It could all have gone so very wrong for Annie Clark.
She’s PJ Harvey plus Björk and minus the edge. She’s adorable, and dare I say it—twee. The first track on Strange Mercy, “Chloe in the Afternoon,” takes its title from the name of a French New Wave film. The worst-case scenario is shaping up to be Zooey Deschanel with a couple of effects pedals and a synth. And why the pseudonym “St. Vincent”? After the New York hospital, of course, death-place of poet Dylan Thomas—“It’s the place where poetry comes to die. That’s me.” Oh dear.
This renders all the more remarkable the fact that Clark deftly sidesteps the trap of cutesy pretension. The Texas native began making serious waves in the indie rock world with her 2009 album Actor, a highly orchestrated, intricate, and altogether far more fragile affair. Now, Clark’s sound is less Baroque and more bold, free of its outer layers and showing some aggression, and at last, bite.
Strange Mercy is shaped by two inimitable forces: Clark’s voice and her guitar. Her singing is angel-sweet, her virtuosic guitar chords startlingly brash and impossible to ignore. The album starts strong—blissfully ignorant of the title’s origins upon my first listen to “Chloe in the Afternoon,” I didn’t even know to be mildly irritated. Title aside, it is a fantastic opener. Clark sets the scene for the album, keening and cooing, punctuated by her signature guitar bursts. Single “Cruel” is a wonder; St. Vincent dips her toe into the murky waters of radio-friendly pop, and finds it suits her just fine. Plus, the accompanying music video is a terrifically constructed bit of second wave feminist surrealism, featuring Clark as a beleaguered housewife who is kidnapped and buried alive by her family.
Like so many other delightful records, Strange Mercy falters slightly in its second half. Though the title track is lovely, the album suffers slightly from the lack of another song like “Cruel.” It meanders into songs that are less than grounded and finds her perilously close to crossing the line from art-pop to pop pretense. But the ever-artful St. Vincent recovers herself in time for the closer “Year of the Tiger,” which showcases Clark at her most bare bones and brilliant.
This summer it was officially declared that The 90s Are Back, and listening to Strange Mercy, I couldn’t agree more. With this album, St. Vincent joins the ranks of that decade’s rock goddesses Harvey, Björk, and Liz Phair— female singer-songwriters who are fearless, overtly sexual, and not content to hide behind acoustic guitars.