Artist: St. Vincent
Album: St. Vincent
If there’s a trend in Annie Clark’s recording career as St. Vincent, it’s an attempt to better articulate herself. Instead of broadening her scope, Clark narrows the margins, tosses the inessential and keeps the bare essentials.
This is what made Strange Mercy a better record than Actor — the former felt like the finished product to the latter’s rough draft. It’s also what made Love This Giant, Clark’s collaboration with Talking Heads’ David Byrne, such a bore. Their relentlessly rigid songs, like miniature structures unto themselves, left no room to breathe.
Though St. Vincent is an improvement, it suffers from similar problems: Clark has stripped down her sound so fundamentally, there’s barely anything left. A claustrophobic sort of modernity haunts the album’s 11 songs — the brassy rattle and hum of “Digital Witness,” the rotary phone dial of “Bring Me Your Loves” — and there’s very little in the way of release that doesn’t feel humourless or static.
What made Clark’s two previous records so good was that her porcelain doll poise was always paired with a wink and a nod. St. Vincent, on the other hand, is sealed so tight it becomes suffocating. One begins to grasp for the instances when Clark sounds like a real person — the crack in her voice during closer “Several Crossed Fingers,” for example, or the airy high notes she doesn’t quite hit in “Regret.”
Even the elegiac “I Prefer Your Love,” written for Clark’s mother during an illness, is unblemished and aerodynamic; each note is measured and micromanaged for potential effect. Unfortunately for Clark, albums aren’t equations to be solved, or numbers to be crunched.
The record is pitch-perfect alternapop, just like its predecessors, but it’s missing the self-awareness and spontaneity that made those records sound so natural, so authentic. With St. Vincent, we’re no longer in on the joke, no matter how funny it is.
Artist: Angel Olsen
Album: Burn Your Fire For No Witness
When I first shared Angel Olsen’s latest album with my friend, his immediate reactions, accounted for via Facebook chat, were: “Well this is beautiful,” “And kind of sad,” and finally “Ok, really sad. But really quite beautiful.” It sounds like a loaded spectrum, but an appropriate one. I mean, the opening track is called “Unfucktheworld.”
After the emotional opener — a simple guitar-led song with vocals reminiscent of a more folkish singer — Olsen immediately swaps melancholy for angst, channeling all her frustrations into the heavy, beat-ridden “Forgiven/Forgotten.” And we’re only on the album’s second track.
The rest of Burn Your Fire follows a similar trend of “mellow song” followed by a feisty one, but never grows wearisome. While the lower production quality on the album can be distracting, it adds an organic layer to Olsen’s music that might otherwise be lost. The album may peak early with “Forgive/Forgotten,” but the tracks that follow after are still worth your attention.
For reasons I can’t isolate, “Dance Slow Decades” also stands out as an album highlight. The name suggests a slower track, which the song delivers on, but it’s the pacing throughout that makes it rewarding. It’s hardly the longest track on the album but it feels just as sprawling as songs nearly two minutes longer.
I’ve always admired Olsen’s ability to combine folk with upbeat sounds and country with rock. Often these genres come at a cost, one for the other, but Burn Your Fire shows that you can have your folk and rock it too. Already Olsen’s third full-length, I couldn’t recommend this album more.
Artist: Phantogram
Album: Voices
It’s not that I always expected Phantogram to dissolve into indie pop obscurity, I just always assumed that the Greenwich-based duo would gradually drift into the background, destined for a rotating spot on the Old Navy corporate playlist. It’s changeroom music that occasionally ends up on your iPod.
However, I’m more than happy to report that any doubt I may have had about the group has been sonically drop-kicked out of me after the first listening of Voices.
Phantogram’s sophomore effort straddles the fine line between fuzz rock and ambient pop without committing to either, to an effective degree. From the glitchy opening of “Nothing But Trouble” to the album’s lingering finale, Voices boasts a diversity I found missing from Phantogram’s previous releases.
While the change of pace makes for an engaging format, the album shines brightest on the more upbeat tracks, such as “Black Out Days” and “The Day You Died,” both of which seem ripe for single-hood in the near future.
As is often the case with Phantogram’s genre, the album suffers during the middle tracks from a few meandering songs — “Bad Dreams” stands out as noticeably unremarkable, but Voices jumps back immediately after.
While the name implies wackiness, “Bill Murray,” encompasses the album’s emotional core; it’s a sombre ballad that demonstrates just how much Phantogram have matured as a band.
For the 11th and final track, all the electronica and droning accumulates in proper send-off fashion with “My Only Friend,” a melodramatic stadium-rock anthem that spends over a minute echoing the lyrics, “You’re all I have / My only friend” before getting in the last word with “All the stars with you.”
