Spintricity - St Vincent; Actor

St. Vincent; Actor Annie Clark is a 24 year old multi-tasking maniac hailing from Brooklyn, New York. She’s the solo artist that makes up St. Vincent.

Characterized by her operatic vocals, she’s creating a buzz with here unique blend of instrumentation.

The thing that really strikes me about St. Vincent is the use of dynamic swings in every song to keep the interest up. The album isn’t a long journey across distant lands, it’s like a collection of little journeys, swinging up and down at random. The tracklisting reads like episodes of Seinfeld; The Neighbors, The Bed, The party, The Sequel, etc.

The soundscape has a similar makeup in every song. Imagine the dreamy operatic vocals center-stage, flutes and vocals providing a landscape, and quiet, fast paced cymbals keeping the movement going. The only sound that seems to stand out as digital is the heavily distorted guitar that forcefully makes its way into a number of the songs.

The whole album keeps a kind of whimsical tone throughout, Annie’s soft voice guiding the way, with occasional blips from clarinets and random instruments……Just make sure you don’t start drifting into la-la –land just too soon, because there’s a noisy guitar lurking around a few corners ready to shock you back to reality.

Like being in a dream, running through the meadow in the warm sun, gently caressing the wheat stalks, then getting woken up with a bucket of ice water……..Well, OK, it’s definitely not that extreme, and it only applies to a few songs anyway.

The whole album is delightful and enjoyable for it’s creativity and fresh perspective.

Find it on LP and CD.

St. Vincent, Live at the Bluebird Theater

I showed up to this one fully expecting everything I’d seen in a few poo-tube videos I caught the week earlier. My mental picture; Annie Clark, alone, trying to multitask instruments and hold a show like a street busker, while everyone in the crowd’s shifting anxiously with crossed arms.
Not at all!

She showed up with a whole backup crew that was exactly the same lineup as Dave Matthews and Jimmy Buffett, as she embarrassingly admitted to the crowd.

The live show is strong…..Annie switches up the vocals with two mics. One for her standard vocals, and another right next to it with a little reverb set in for that “omnipresent-god-... that seems to come from everywhere. She switched between them constantly……….. Nice touch I thought.

The energy is picked up a lot from the mostly dreamy album, adding in saxophone, and a lot of violin to change up the pace. Besides that, Annie’s guitar comes in a lot stronger live…..And of course, louder. I would say that the low end of everything was entirely bloated and out of control, something I’ve come to expect out of this particular venue, but despite all that, the airy centerstage vocals came out great and brought out a lot of the subtle shifts in Annie’s voice.
by Mike Mallory Website