Review: St. Vincent – Actor (2009)
A while back, I read on Billboard that St. Vincent (singer/songwriter Annie Clark) composed her sophomore album, Actor, in Apple’s GarageBand. It seemed a strange reversal of the stereotypical songwriting process, the image of a band/artist sitting in an isolated room (“Dude, we gotta…write something new”), strumming out chords (“…better, closer, warmer”) until they find (“That’s it! Okay”*) the right notes. Instead, we get Clark, Nouveau Artiste, carefully hammering out all the fussy vagaries first, only then cycling back and spit-polishing it with words and melodies. The end result, though not as puckishly fun as her debut, boasts a more unified tone, the exact sort of stylistic continuity that Marry Me so cheerfully spurned. This is neither a ‘yay’ nor a ‘boo’, really, merely a differentiation – Actor works very nearly as well as its predecessor, but fastidiously avoids being a retread.
It isn’t by any means a reinvention: Clark’s voice remains as beatific and enthralling as ever, and her impishly deft lyrics still stand (pleasantly) at odds with her soothing delivery. The music itself still revolves very much around the clash of opposing elements, and although oftentimes the fireworks here are less dramatic, the production itself remains clean and layered. One mustn’t forget, of course, that Clark herself handles a half-dozen or so instruments on the album, a sort of multitracked She-Hulk, and it’s a testament to her ability that it all holds together so beautifully.
St. Vincent’s “Marrow.” from Actor.
Musically, the album sheds much of the playful, Kate Bush-esque mischievousness (who likes singing babies? St. Vincent likes singing babies!) of its predecessor, instead building around a harder-driving, percussion-centric dynamic, most obvious on “Actor Out of Work” or the jackhammer-like denouement of “Black Rainbow”. That’s not to say that the entirety of the experience is a drum loop, but there’s a certain level of cohesion here, a level of sameness, some might argue, that is more obvious than on Marry Me.
This new instrumentation is sometimes to the music’s advantage (“The Neighbors”) and sometimes to its detriment (“Actor Out of Work”, which threatens to drown both Clark’s voice and her wit in banal orchestration), but either way proves to be the album’s defining characteristic. The album’s biggest weakness, in fact, may be the mild sense of deja vu that some of these songs elicit on first listen – “The Strangers”, “Save Me From What I Want”, and “Laughing With a Mouth of Blood” are each built around drum machine and a sort of call-and-response structure that feels slightly samey by the third time it pops up. Some might see this as thematic songwriting, but it teeters on the brink of homogeny.
Still, the fundamentals are strong. The album’s best tracks (such as cacophonous pseudodance anthem “Marrow” and deep blue, dreamlike “The Bed”) play up Clark’s love of juxtaposition, whether it be enormously distorted guitars vs. catchy dance-pop on “Marrow” or the delicate interplay between her angelic vocals and playfully dark lyrics on “The Bed” (“Don’t move / Don’t scream / Or we will have to shoot / Stop right where you stand / we need a chalk outline if you can / put your hands where we can see them”). At her peak, St. Vincent surprises us with the deftness of her compositions and the stark contrasts that form them.
One might miss the slightly more guitar-and-keyboard driven sound of her debut, and let’s be honest, the girl can rock, but St. Vincent can hardly be criticized for daring to step outside her comfort zone. This is not a bold, Kid A or Pinkerton-type move that leaves the artist trailing clouds of glory or crawling back to square one, humbled, but an organic, understandable step into the wild. And as such, it can’t honestly be considered anything less than a success.
* apologies to Tenacious D.
