The seventh album that singer-songwriter-multi-instrumentalist Annie Clark has launched as St. Vincent teems with the sort of visceral imagery that sticks with you lengthy after her songs fade out. There’s a “hungry little flea” able to infect your “heat physique,” a predator on the road turning aggression into an evil blues promise, a sink that runs purple, a head that received’t cease banging, a dream that ends in hell. “I really feel like graffiti on a urinal,” she sings. Hey, we’ve all been there.
Clark’s music has at all times been fearlessly intimate. (Certainly one of her most well-known songs, 2017’s “New York,” turned on the scorched-earth kiss-off “You’re the one motherfucker within the metropolis who can deal with me.”) Typically, although, she will get at her laborious truths by blurring the road between autobiography and artifice, hiding her personal picture in rigorously constructed aesthetic masks. On her final album, 2021’s Daddy’s Residence, she used Seventies glam-rock as a mirror-stage to discover emotions about her father’s incarceration for securities fraud and different finance-related crimes. On the LP’s cowl, she appeared in a blonde wig, as if deploying a Warhol-esque deflection within the face of uncomfortable private actuality.
All Born Screaming is extra primal than conceptual, and that makes it a refreshing change-up amongst St. Vincent albums. A number of songs call to mind the commercial bloodlettings of 9 Inch Nails, the self-emptying operatic art-goth grind of Tori Amos’ 1998 album From the Choir Lady Resort, the bluedgoning tumult of Nirvana. Dave Grohl bashes alongside on two songs, and among the album was recorded at Electrical Audio, the Chicago studio run by Steve Albini, whose credit embody Nirvana’s In Utero. The outcomes may be harrowing: on “Damaged Man,” she performs a wannabe “king-size killer,” recognizably pathetic and harmful, as mean-spirited distortion and metallic drums amp up the sense of menace. “Reckless” begins as a tense, mournful piano ballad, with Clark promising to “tear you limb from limb or I’ll fall in love,” then explodes right into a seething Reznorian slither. “Flea” goes from winking verse to pummeling alt-rock refrain, as Clark’s metaphorical insect guarantees to suck you dry whenever you least anticipate it.
But when All Born Screaming is a darkish album, it’s not a bleak one. Whilst Clark’s lyrics are inclined to dwell within the house between connection and contempt, need and disgust (she calls this album “post-plague pop”), the music by no means feels gloomy or defeated. Clark self-produced for the primary time in her profession (working with mates on drums like Grohl, Stella Mogzawa, and Josh Freese, and the art-pop artist Cate Le Bon), and you’ll really feel an actual sense of discovery as she shifts the sonic lens, even on this file’s hardest, heaviest moments. “Hell Is Right here” splits the distinction between foreboding and transporting, a bit like David Bowie’s “5 Years,” drifting spaciously over an ascending bassline and complicated guitar determine. “Sweetest Fruit” makes use of jumpy electro-bloops as a backdrop for Clark’s signature deconstructed guitar flash, as she delivers lyrics that starvation for pleasure as an antidote to malaise. On “The Energy’s Out,” societal collapse blurs into anarchic year-zero freedom (“nobody can blame us now that the ability’s out”), as Clark’s voice extends gorgeously over a naked beat and an elegiac, Brian Eno-esque synth drone. With its reggae beat and wry, relaxed melody, “So Many Planets” is the sort of intelligent, worldly avant-pop her pal and collaborator David Byrne has typically specialised in, with a scorching Clark solo and reassuring “la la la” chorus.
She ends it on the massive, statement-making seven-minute title observe, one other tune that feels liberated and scary on the similar time. The track begins out vivid and bouncy, then fades the ambient ether as a voice-of-God choir swoops in to remind us we’re “all born screaming,” turning that resigned warning right into a brooding incantation. Then the observe heats again up right into a fierce, frenzied digital babble. It’s music that evokes the phobia all of us share in simply being alive, and the best way that combating via it’s a type of fixed rebirth all of us share, too. That’s the sort of reality this album excavates and celebrates many instances, and why that is a few of Annie Clark’s most satisfyingly pressing music but.
