release date: May 14, 2021
format: digital (14 x File, FLAC)
[album rate: 3 / 5] [3,12]
producer: Annie Clark & Jack Antonoff
label: Loma Vista Recordings - nationality: USA
Track highlights: 1. "Pay Your Way in Pain" (live) - 2. "Down and Out Downtown" - 3. "Daddy's Home" - 4. "Live in the Dream" - 5. "The Melting of the Sun" - 7. "The Laughing Man" - 10. "Somebody Like Me"
7th studio album by St. Vincent follows 2½ years after MassEducation (Oct. 2018), which didn't really offer brand new songs but merely contained acoustic interpretations of songs from Masseduction (Oct. 2017), which still counts as St. Vincent's most recent album, and this new one is like that made in collaboration with producer Jack Antonoff, who is also credited as co-composer on five cuts.
Stylistically, it's unsurprisingly a new mix that Annie Clark comes up with here, although as her recent releases it's music without her previously distinct guitar signature, which markedly characterised her first albums. Where Masseduction offered experimental synthpop, she has now dressed out in 70s nostalgia with equal parts of psychedelic pop and soft glam rock - or: soft psychedelic rock and glam pop. The songs are quiet ones in a laid-back style with focus on the narrative, and it sounds to me like Clark has plowed through everything with Bowie from Aladdin Sane (1973) to Young Americans (1975) and then with some inspiration from Pink Floyd she has set the stove on a low flame. And St. Vincent does share some traits with Bowie: she is always a distinct persona, based on her latest music, and you never know in which direction she moves from there, but you know it's top-dollar-styled like a new production by Andrew Lloyd Webber without ever revealing the actual living individual behind the mask. In the long run, St. Vincent may touch on enervating, and I'm no (longer) the great St. Vincent fan I used to be after her first three albums where she was Annie Clark - the fabulous musician and brilliant guitarist. Now the whole thing has really gone Big Business and she has to conquer every scene dressed up in a new skin suit matching a new ground tone and new musical ideas. It's completely deliciously produced and beautifully executed, but unfortunately also... touching on boring. It lacks edge and a will to mark itself as anything other than another one of today's greats with an album you'll see high up in the charts and which will be forgotten in a year. Don't forget to make great music!!
Not recommended.
