The Sauced Bulletin

I’m going to get this out of the way now so we can get on with the rest of the review:  Annie Clark is a beautiful woman.  She has a very stately, demure, and all-around gorgeous fairy-like quality to her.  She’s pretty, ok?!  So for the rest of this review of her new record, Strange Mercy, I’m going to do my best to focus on the music and put aside thoughts of how nice it would probably be to be married to Annie Clark and live together in an apartment or on her tour bus and have her bounce song ideas off me and go to movies together and make breakfast together and stuff like that.  Serious music review here!

The awesome thing, or at least my favorite thing, about St. Vincent is the darkness that lurks at the edge of every song.  Synth burbles, disembodied vocal sounds, Annie’s filthy buzz-saw guitar; all of these things clash with her lovely voice and the sometimes Disney movie-esque production to create a wonderful tension and unease.  This was true on Actor, her last record, and it’s doubly true on Strange Mercy.  Producer John Congleton pares down the string arrangements in favor of synths and just plain space, leaving room for Annie’s voice and guitar to do the talking.

And that fucking GUITAR.  After the first lilting moments of “Chloe in the Afternoon” Annie’s familiar low-end skronk breaks through like a cloud of black smoke.  Her part on “Cruel” sounds like she’s revving up a chainsaw in slow motion, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the “solo” at the end of “Northern Lights” was just Annie stabbing her unplugged chord through the mixing board.  I suppose somebody had to step up for Jack White since the White Stripes called it quits, and Clark is the ballsiest, most original guitarist of anyone else around.  Nobody melts faces as uniquely as she does.

But it would all be for nought without her exquisite voice and superbly creepy lyrics to balance things out.  Clark sings sweetly about “leather whips” on the opening track, asks a surgeon to cut her open on “Surgeon,” and asks somebody names Elijah (biblical figure) to undress her at the end of “Dilettante.”  All of this and more is delivered to us via the voice of a fucking angel.  Her best vocal moment comes when she breaks that character in the title track.  The acid dripping from her tongue is palpable as she seethes “If I ever meet the dirty policeman who roughed you up/I don’t know what.”  I would NOT want to be that cop.

So is Strange Mercy the best record of the year?  I can’t say for sure.  It’s definitely up there with the likes of Kaputt, Smoke Ring for my Halo, Helplessness Blues, and The King of Limbs,  but it also has its flaws.  The middle section/second half tends to meander a bit, settling into a pace almost too comfortable for its own good, but this is a minor trifle.  Strange Mercy is a sublime album, from the instrumentation to the production to the awesome cover art.  We’ll see if Neon Indian, Girls, and M83 can knock it down a few pegs in the coming weeks, but I wouldn’t hold my breath.

Oh, I almost forgot.  Annie Clark, WILL YOU MARRY ME PLEASE!?!