AOTY #2: St Vincent – Strange Mercy
Label: 4AD
Released: September 12
I feel a strange sort of disconnect from this record now and haven’t put it on in a while, but it still thoroughly deserves such a high placing. Annie Clark is well on her way to becoming one of the cult musicians of her generation; I’ll be thrilled to tell my grand-nieces and nephews that I saw her play. Here’s a feature I did on her for NME, more after the jump:
SERIAL KILLER RIFFS
St Vincent’s reinvention as an axe-wielding heroine has produced arguably the guitar album of 2011. And, as she tells Laura Snapes, she owes it all to her obsession with murder
“Shit, fuck it up!” Whereas your average strumming Jim might rally his band into song with a steady, “ah-one-two-three-four”, St Vincent – aka 28-year old Dallas native Annie Clark – has different ideas at the London’s Barbican venue, shouting this order at her surprised saxophone player.
That was back in July, when she covered ‘Big Black Mariah’ for a night in tribute to Tom Waits’ feted 1985 album ‘Rain Dogs’, a yarn of salty hounds and seedy coves that doesn’t require much help in the fucked-up department. One minute in, Clark was transformed – snarling, clawing at the body of her Harmony Bobkat guitar (the same brand Jack White plays); a world away from when we last saw her, touring 2009’s elegantly poised ‘Actor’.
Clark has come a long way since being a member of frock-wearing hippies Polyphonic Spree in her early 20s. You might know her from her critically beloved albums: 2007′s ‘Marry Me’, a low-key, sweet debut written almost entirely on computer, full of canny lines like “We’ll do what Mary and Joseph did/Without the kid”. Follow-up ‘Actor’ was less playful, detailing suburban darkness with dizzying woodwind and showboating strings, inspired by watching Disney films on mute and reimagining the soundtracks. Although her guitar skills underpinned every song, she only unleashed the feral fret-frotting occasionally. Hence the surprise at her behaviour at the Barbican show, looking like she’s auditioning for a Slayer support slot.
“I was in a noise band in college, Skull Fuckers,” Clark explains over coffee at a sweaty central London café when we catch up with her later, the Barbican show memory still stamped on our skull. “That band was about getting really aggressive and ugly. I don’t think I’ve ever pushed myself that hard,” she adds, recalling another frenetic live show that came shortly afterwards in New York, where she nailed a similarly ferocious cover of Big Black’s ‘Kerosene’. “That night I unloaded every bit of misanthropic bile in my body, and people cheered!”
It wasn’t just the crowd cheering. The original scribe of ‘Kerosene’, Steve Albini – the guitar legend who has produced everyone from Nirvana to PJ Harvey to the Manics – once proclaimed, “I like big-ass vicious noise that makes my head spin.” “I found out from a friend that he liked the cover. It’s the biggest compliment!” Clark trills.
It comes as little surprise, then, that despite being written and recorded before these two gigs took place, for Clark’s third album, the wide-eyed prettiness of its predecessor is no longer on the agenda. ‘Strange Mercy’ is dark, peculiarly beautiful, and most importantly, one of the year’s greatest guitar records.
Back in January, when battles were raging over the health of guitar music, few would have thought that Annie Clark would make one of the albums that would put the kibosh on that argument. It came as just as much of a surprise to her too.
“I’ve been writing on the computer since I was 14 – I’ve rarely written just on guitar. The closing song is called ‘Year Of The Tiger’ [which ran from February 2010 to February 2011]. It was the darkest year of my life – I lost people that I loved,” she says quietly, pointing her face up at the ceiling and cupping her flat white coffee. “I couldn’t take being in New York any more because it was too overwhelming, so I went on a whim out to Seattle, where my friend Jason McGerr from Death Cab For Cutie has a studio. I wanted to see if I could be the troubadour, and write a proper Neil Young-style song song, on guitar.”
Bored with the filigreed orchestration that had couched her last record, Clark aimed to make “music for the American recession”. Or, in plain English, a record chock-full of focused, dazzling riffs – as on the King Crimson-indebted freakout of ‘Northern Lights’, or the dizzying, deranged ‘Surgeon’.
“I was trying to leave space for your ears to readjust, and let there be air in the room,” she explains. “To let there be life. I wanted to make something people who can’t dance can kind of dance to – sexy, and sleazier than before. Things are more emotionally immediate, there’s more simple form, then when I got into the studio with [producer] John Congleton in mid-February, we put everything through the meat grinder.”
It’s an appropriate word to describe her relationship with long-term producer Congleton, with whom she first bonded over the realisation that they both knew a lot more than was healthy about serial killers.
“I have a very specific memory of my stepmother reading a book called The Mammoth Book Of Murder, a compendium of serial killers from the 19th and 20thcenturies,” she laughs. “It described their crimes in really gory detail – on car trips I used to read about how Jack The Ripper got his victims. John had a really similar interest – we talked about Ed Gein, the inspiration for Psycho, the one who wanted to make a skin suit. And Ted Bundy – he was actually very handsome and charming, and he’d lure women into his apartment by pretending he was struggling on crutches…”
Making friendships over murders mirrors the contradictions that run through ‘Strange Mercy’. “It’s about people looking for catharsis through pain,” she explains of the title track. So ‘Chloe In The Afternoon’ details some light S&M – “no kisses, no real names” – and ‘Champagne Year’ is a gorgeous, resigned love letter to disappointment: “So I thought I learned my lesson/But I secretly expected/A choir at the shore and confetti through the falling air”. Whereas ‘Actor’ was masked by the perspectives of different characters, given the sad events that inspired it, ‘Strange Mercy’ sees Annie wear her bruised heart on her sleeve: “There’s less hiding here. I have always revealed myself emotionally in serpentine ways, which I’m less afraid of now – sometimes when you go through something that shows you that life is so short, you realise there’s nothing to be afraid of.”
Not that fear is something that anyone will be associating with the formidable shredder any time soon. Frankly, there’s better cause to be scared of her…
“What did I learn when making this record? That I might be a serial killer!” she laughs. “No, the opposite – I learned more about forgiveness, human compassion, and not trying to manhandle and strangle the life out of songs. I think my live show will be harder and darker than ever before. That feels right. That feels natural now.”
ANNIE’S GUITAR PICKS
St Vincent’s favourite guitar shredders
‘Dimebag’ Darrell Abbott, Pantera
Annie: “When I first heard the bizarro Dimebag harmonics on ‘The Cemetery Gates’ at age 13, I thought I was hearing the very embodiment of evil. Which is to
say, I was as intrinsically drawn to it as I was mortified by it.”Andy Gill, Gang Of Four
“Some guitar players can gently cajole and coerce a guitar to sing. Some
guitar players can make a guitar beg and squeal for its very life. Andy Gill
falls into the latter category.”Jeff Hanneman and Kerry King, Slayer
“There is jockish musical athleticism, which can be admirable, but lack
emotion. Then there is unwieldy, savant-ish creativity, which can be
fearsome, but unreliable. Somewhere between those is the ideal – this is the
domain of Slayer… plus a whole lot of doom and destruction.”
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Tags: 4AD, St Vincent, Strange Mercy
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