Leave it, as always and forever as Kip’s wedding song in Napoleon Dynamite, to me-something awesome happens, and it takes me far, far too long to say a single thing about it.
Last week, our friends at Wordsmiths Books in Decatur, GA, hosted an album-release party for Annie “St. Vincent” Clark’s debut Marry Me-an album which, gentle readers, should have been introduced to you ages ago via a Res whisper in your ear, with hints and allegations of brilliance.
Yeah, well, things happen. Marry Me is out, the free, solo in-store party for the album is over, and, as far as the world is concerned, it’s already old blog history. You Ed Banger kids these days, with your whump whump and your whamp whamp, always so quick to jump on the next trend…
but wait. have you LISTENED to Marry Me? No, I mean, really listened? Since the album’s arrival, everyone, even our popwatching Entertainment Weekly buds who, at times, find the need to remind us that, to the mass media at large, “released internationally” < "released domestically", have fallen head over heels and then back to firm feet-planted love with Annie Clark. She, an alum of both Sufjan Studies and Polyphonic Spreeing, has a sound that's less immediately razor-sharp than her contemporary Shara "My Brightest Diamond" Worden, herself a fellow graduate of Sufjan School. It's also a lot more tongue-in-cheek, and with that comes a sense of never quite being able to tell at which point Annie ends and St. Vincent begins.
But words, at this point, mean nothing. They've all been written, it's all been said-Marry Me is a fantastic album, folksy, orchestral, baroque, ripping, over-the-top-it all fits, and it’s all redundant. St. Vincent’s one of those “so superstar on blogs” artists for whom the fanfare actually end when the album’s released (and I mean really released, not in-your-downloads released) for public auditory consumption.
(See also: Clap Your Justice Say Helsinki)
Only…last week, with just Annie on Wordsmiths’ intimate stage, whispering, yelping, stomping as though she’d something to break (quite possibly herself), the already back-of-hand-familiar songs that were nursed and forced, at times alternating and at times simultaneously, into the ether sparkled with something that’s so damn fresh this year that it begs to be screamed from rooftops:
ability.
(photo of Annie St Vincent Clark at the Marry Me release show at Wordsmiths Books)
This has not been a good year for proper singer/songwriter talent, and that’s understandable. We suffered a massive folk explosion over the past two years, and really the world needs to be aware a second Jose Gonzalez album is simply not needed (at least without a Knife album to both precede it and give Jose a single). It’s also good for the rock kids to finally know who the hell “Daft Punk” are (yeah, “are”, not “is”…oh, hell, you haven’t learned a thing, have you?)-but, really, to steal a line from Chris Griffin: That’s Enough James Murphy! If the phenomenon that Arcade Fire’s Neon Bible has been has set anything else alight, hopefully it’s been that there’s just not enough real, honest-to-Asthmatic songs floating about right now, which may be a direct result of the Dance Party It Up! atmosphere that music and its collection, consumption, and absorption exists in right now, in the time of the machine of Hype.
So when St. Vincent opens her mouth and the coy, tart sour apple come-on “Your Lips Are Red” comes out, it’s as though double-entendres and wry humor have never before existed in popular music. At the Wordsmiths show, as she drew the song to a whispered close, the soul of the song benefited from the intimate environment, the stripped-down nature, and even the stage’s warm lighting-Annie, herself quite pale, wrapped the moment the song’s thumping crescendo falls away into the sound of a pleading open hand becoming a fist, simply stating “your skin so fair. it’s not fair”.
St. Vincent: Your Lips Are Red (album version)
Annie as a solo St. Vincent let the music do the talking, peppering her break-the-stage shuffle of Marry Me’s “Paris Is Burning” with an unreleased song and a cover of Jackson Browne’s love note to/for Nico, “These Days”. Both were straight-up, standard singer/songwriter fair, but also a rare glimpse into something that, for an artist who’s being labeled “confessional” and whose album title is apparently chanted back at her nightly as proposals by fans, St. Vincent tends to dance away from-the standard heart-and-sleeve confessional. If that’s what ruined the attempted rise of real songwriting a year or two ago, perhaps the stuff on Marry Me-the raw carnival freak-out of “Now Now”, the “Genie in a Bottle” chorus of “Paris Is Burning” that’s then trampled by the hyper-frantic drum stomp (leading me to believe that a D.A.N.C.E. P.A.R.I.S. remix could potentially save the world), the coy coo of “Landmines”, and that unforgettable (don’t, don’t forget, don’t) raw and rare thrashing intro to “Your Lips Are Red”-can bring it, kicking and screaming, into the same cool-kid zone that any skinny-jeans concocted White Stripes remix exists in.
Marry Me benefits from Annie’s seeming inability to be afraid of the directions her music wants to go. This could easily have been a coffeehouse album, all soft and strumming dove-wings and finger-to-lips “shhhhhhhh”ing. But with a thunderous percussion backing and a twisted sense of humor, it becomes nearly a shame, and certainly a disservice, to classify St. Vincent by any one song. There’s a difference between being so cool on the interwebs, and being an artist. It’s a shame Annie doesn’t rap-quite a few lines about how her game is realer than most are coming to mind right now. This is true, literate pop music, both taking itself completely seriously and refusing to not stick its tongue out at anything. More importantly, this is an album, and a band, and a singer/songwriter/multi-instrumentalist who, like her former Chief of Staff S. Stevens, requires utmost attention now and forever.
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