St. Vincent
Actor
4AD
By Mike Randall
As St. Vincent, Annie Clark doesn’t paint with a modern palette of colors. Influenced by films such as Sleeping Beauty and The Wizard of Oz as much as any kind of musical muse, you don’t so much listen to her songs as you do watch them through a multi-plane camera. With Actor, the follow-up to her critically acclaimed debut Marry Me, Clark has constructed a movie score for her dark cartoon-world mind, one seemingly loaded with yellow brick roads covered by dense grey clouds and dwarfs carrying loaded guns.
The quirky, intricate pop tendencies of Marry Me remain, but the sophistication of the arrangements has been taken to another level. Clark, whose resume includes stints as guitarist and background vocalist for the Polyphonic Spree (on their third album, Fragile Army), as part of Glenn Branca's 100 Guitar Orchestra, and as a member of Sufjan Stevens ' touring band, is joined by an assembly of talent that helps bring her surreal imagination to life. French horn, sarongi and choirs of heavenly voices coalesce with the playing of Hideaki Aomori (Sufjan Stevens), Alex Sopp (Björk, Phillip Glass), and Midlake's McKenzie Smith and Paul Alexander, while Clark conducts the orchestra and contributes multi-instrumental and vocal performances that put some theater back into the world of animation.
Don’t be misled, though, these aren’t Saturday morning cartoons for the children. During “The Bed,” Clark sings of her fear of the monsters that lurk beneath her bed, but she’s willing to take them on with her father’s Smith & Wesson. “We’ve gotta teach them all a lesson,” she announces over soothing piano, lurking violin and a heartbeat of percussion. She continues darkening the animated mindset, separating the sound from the theme with the cinematic arrangement “Black Rainbow.” Bouncing on a hypnotic keyboard while horns and strings swirl around her, painting all sorts of colors, going from light to dark and building up a storm front, Clark sings of it being nighttime all the time: “There’s a black rainbow above my house/Match the curtains and floors.” Songs like “The Neighbors” are sung in an almost children’s folk-song melody (somewhere between “Ring Around the Rosie” and “Rock-a-bye Baby”), but Clark’s sinister nature lends a much harder edge. She’s clearly up to something when she asks, “What would your mother say/What would your father do/What would the neighbors think if they only knew?”
From a musical standpoint, Clark admitted that she wanted to “make these songs Technicolor animatronic rides,” and she succeeded in making every song an instrumental adventure. During “The Strangers,” winding, weeping accordion, descending strings and delicately plucked acoustic guitar converge with background electric guitar riffing that eventually comes to the surface with manic energy. It’s simultaneously intricate and surreal, especially when the choir behind her repeatedly chants, “Paint the black hole blacker.” The trip continues with “Save Me From What I Want,” as a bubble of tension-filled keyboard battles an orchestra of noise and bursts into an almost Talking Heads dance rhythm of flower-y guitar. Her harmonization with a gorgeous classical piano groove during “The Party” and chiming bedtime arpeggios of “Just The Same But Brand New” are as compelling a moments as you’ll hear all year, while the menacing psych-funk of “Marrow,” with its vocal interlude of “H-E-L-P Help Me,” proves there’s some serious soul behind the virtuosity.
As the blossoming strings of acoustic guitar gives way to a down-tempo groove during “Laughing With A Mouth of Blood,” Clark reveals, “All my old friends aren’t so friendly.” Whether she’s referencing being haunted by childhood memories or an outcast adolescence, one gets the sense that after making Actor, she’s at peace with her past. During the same song, she sings, “I can’t see the future but I know it’s got big plans for me.” Because she can see the past so well, that future is now.
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