MUSIC
Inside St. Vincent’s New Album
Artist’s music has looked to the future — until now
BY STEVE ERICKSON
When St. Vincent
named her second
album, “Actor,”
she was telling us
something. While working under
a pseudonym (her real name is
Annie Clark) isn’t so meaningful
in itself, she refuses to be pinned
down. Despite very public relationships
with actress Cara Delevigne
and Sleater-Kinney guitarist Carrie
Brownstein (and making out
with Dua Lipa in a performance at
the 2019 Grammys), she won’t label
her sexuality. (Despite this, her
“Fast Slow Disco” video portrays
her as the only woman dancing at
a crowded gay bar.)
Although an extremely skilled
guitarist, she supported her last,
most pop-oriented album, “Masseduction,”
with a tour where she
sang to a backing track. Her image
in its videos offered a version
of traditional femininity exaggerated
to the point of overt fakeness;
in fact, the visual for “Pills” uses
women acting like awkwardly animated
mannequins.
“Pay Your Way in Pain,” the fi rst
single from her new album “Daddy’s
Home,” lifts from David Bowie’s
mid ‘70s “plastic soul” period.
Bowie’s “Fame” is a remarkable
concoction of confl icting emotions:
a spiraling panic attack expressed
through slick funk. “Pay Your Way
in Pain” doesn’t even try to conceal
its grim subject matter, with
a “pain! shame!” refrain (echoing
“Fame”) and details about going
hungry and getting locked out of
your apartment. The video shows
St. Vincent dancing on her own in
a deserted studio, with dated video
effects and a piano and guitar her
only companions.
As on “Masseduction,” St. Vincent
produced “Daddy’s Home”
with Jack Antonoff. They have undeniable
craft and an expert ear
for pastiche of rock and R&B circa
1974, with an underlying sense
that something’s off. The lyrics
drop explicit references to Nina Simone,
Joni Mitchell, Pink Floyd’s
“Dark Side of the Moon” and John
St. Vincent’s latest album is called “Daddy’s Home.”
Cassavetes’ fi lm “A Woman Under
the Infl uence.” Few actual ‘70s
rockers rolled out the electric sitar
as often as this album does, especially
as a lead instrument. The
6 & ½-minute ballad “Live in the
Dream” creates a desolate mood
with a sea of reverb and the album’s
slowest tempo; “the dream”
implies popping a large handful of
tranquilizers and falling asleep,
only for reality to intrude with St.
Vincent’s Lou Reed-infl uenced guitar
solo.
“Daddy’s Home” looks back at the
New York of ubiquitous Quaaludes,
Warhol’s Factory (the fi nal song,
“Candy Darling,” salutes the transgender
star of his underground
fi lms) and Max’s Kansas City, but
it winds up constructing a nostalgic
yet bleary world out of musical
references.
Much of the press for this album
has centered around the fact that
it addresses her father’s 10-year
sentence for white collar crime. The
title track describes visiting him
in jail, calling him “inmate #502.”
But the personal reminiscence
feels contradicted by the way the
album is so soaked in ‘70s references.
The experience described in
that song has been shared by millions
WIKIMEDIA COMMONS/RAPH_PH - WOWGOTH090818-78
of people, the vast majority
not being children of millionaires,
but its Steely Dan, Jr. electric pianos
ground it in a much different
time from the 2010-2019 stretch
he actually served for a $43 million
stock fraud scheme.
Although less direct, “Down” is
the best of the three singles St. Vincent
dropped from “Daddy’s Home”
before its release date. Coming after
the drugged-out “The Laughing
Man,” its anger at an abusive
lover and determination to get revenge
on them takes the album in
a 180-degree turn. Even if the fake
color fading and fi lm scratches of
its video continue the analog fetish
of St. Vincent’s current era,
the groove, driven by cowbells and
electric keyboards, works on its
own, not as period affectations,
just as “Los Ageless,” her most
popular single from “Masseduction,”
created synth-pop that didn’t
look back towards the ‘80s.
In an essay about Janis Joplin,
the late feminist critic Ellen Willis
wrote “the relationship of public
personality to private self is especially
problematic for a woman… A
woman is usually aware, on some
level, that men do not allow her to
be her real self, and worse, the acceptable
masks represent men’s
fantasies, not her own.” St. Vincent’s
act resembles visual artists
like Cindy Sherman; rather than
bowing to the demand that female
musicians must reveal their real
selves, she presents herself as a
series of media creations. But her
project would be lifeless if those
creations didn’t express something
real. For instance, the structure of
“Pills” mirrors both the ups and
downs of bipolar disorder and the
cycle of euphoria and comedown
following drug use.
“Daddy’s Home” is a very
pleasant listen, although it damages
its momentum as soon as it
starts with most of the fi rst half
sharing the same downbeat pace.
(Songs that work OK on their own
don’t benefi t from the sequencing.)
“Down” deserves to complete
the indie rock-to-pop single
crossover she began with “Los
Ageless.” The “Daddy’s Home”
concept may not be as directly
autobiographical as it promised,
but it tells a running narratives
about self-destructive, damaged
people of her parents’ generation
that continues into the present,
as she sings “Pills and Juuls and
speed/Your little purse a pharmacy/
And hide behind those
things so no one can see you’re
not getting”.) But there’s more
fi ller here than on her past few
albums, despite containing only
11 songs (minus interludes.)
There may be a larger point to
this album: We can’t understand
our lives — or the lives of our parents,
taking place when we were
children or before we were born —
without these references to the music
and movies that shaped them.
But St. Vincent’s music has always
looked towards the future, suggesting
possibilities taking shape, until
now. Apart from their reliance
on personae, St. Vincent never
seemed to have much in common
with another Jack Antonoff collaborator,
Lana del Rey, but here, she
falls into del Rey’s overreliance on
pop culture easter eggs.
ST. VINCENT | Daddy’s Home|
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May 20 - June 2,36 2021 | GayCityNews.com
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