St Vincent – Actor

St Vincent - Actor

Not that I want to make any broad, sweeping generalisations or anything, but the British music scene is currently dominated by female singers, song writers and musicians who all seem to be doing much the same thing. Little Boots, Florence and the Machine, Ladyhawke, La Roux and the rest are all nestling somewhere on the sound/look radar between ‘the 1980s’ and ‘twee’ and it’s boring. There have been numerous articles in the British press where writers have applauded the industry/themselves for managing to move on from backward-looking blokey bands to backward-looking, pretty women. La Roux’s hair may be a work of art, but that’s about it.

Those seeking some kind of relief from the kind of music that we in the UK are currently being told to like could do a lot worse than picking up the new album by St Vincent. Actor is a huge step forward from her still impressive 2007 debut, Marry Me, finding her coasting along delicately on gorgeous, string-laden backdrops one minute, before wielding a guitar in the middle of all that prettiness the next. There is real experimentation here, while the lyrics swing between dry humour and pathos; both reveal themselves with each listen. Oh, and her hair’s pretty good too.

St Vincent, real name Annie Clark, has constructed a wonderfully intricate album, both musically and lyrically. More often than not, the songs are built around her string arrangements, which are deliberately Disney-esque; however, she builds up these fairytale worlds in order to knock them down. Her guitar playing is extraordinary; she’ll tear into these distorted riffs suddenly, almost splitting her songs in two. These moments of energy sound like real pockets of release; they are the catharsis that Clark avoids in her mannered, controlled vocal delivery.

Like artists such as Kate Bush or PJ Harvey before her, Clark adopts characters for her lyrics. On Actor, she concerns herself with women trapped by relationships, suburbia or normality, and the strings-guitar bi-polar music perfectly suits her words. Lead single ‘The Strangers’ is a case in point; wedding day fights and Playboys under mattresses are repressed until the song erupts half way through.

‘Save Me From What I Want’ is jerky mix of percussion and processed guitars with Clark declaring ‘I’m a wife in watercolours, I can wash away/What seventeen cold showers couldn’t wash away’; it sounds like some kind of despair experienced through a Prozac-clouded mind. The tension breaks a little on ‘The Neighbours’, where the watchful gaze of nuns, parents and neighbours provoke a rare crack in Clark’s delicate voice. It works brilliantly.

Actor, then, is an album about masks and roles, not just for Clark herself but for the characters she inhabits. She lets her mind runaway with her in the two-minute burst of distorted guitar and choirs on ‘Actor Out Of Work’, while ‘Laughing With A Mouthful of Blood’ sounds oddly cool and detached for all the violence and loneliness of its lyrics. ‘Marrow’, meanwhile, messes with its own time signatures as Clark almost whispers what she should be shouting: ‘H-E-L-P/Help me, help me’.

Having spent time in other people’s bands before moving to take centre stage, Clark has honed her own vision impressively. For all its characters and masks, Actor is all Clark; nuanced, intelligent, and multi-layered. It may sound a little obtuse at first, but becomes easy to love over time.

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