St. Vincent: Strange Mercy

If you've been reading this blog long enough, you'll remember I don't spend a ton of time discussing lyrics. As much as a good lyric can really make a song, my way of thinking about music doesn't really depend on them too much. There have been a lot of extremely lyrically-well-written albums on this site, whose words I just didn't pay much mind to. I missed a ton of the nuance in The Hold Steady's Stay Positive. And after reading numerous write-ups of Arcade Fire's Funeral, I still don't quite "hear" what they're singing about, and that's one of my favourite albums I've written about yet. It's a bit of a shame, that lyrics often make up a huge amount of the work that goes into an album, and yet they comprise so little of the listening pleasure for me. St. Vincent's lyrics, for instant, are weirdly brilliant. They're often abstract, or impressionistic, (and often directly confrontational) and intricately-crafted, woven into the art of the album, to the point where they cross-reference each other on a few tracks. The lyric sheet of this album is quite frankly drowning with brilliance.

But I don't love it because it has great lyrics. Even knowing how great they are, I pay more attention to how they're put together, delivered, and fused with the sonic landscape of the album. St. Vincent has put together a very deliberate thing here, playing off novel takes on moods and idiosyncratic rhythms and shifts in tone that combine into this one specific thing in a very precise thing. Unconventional isn't quite the right word, because that sounds like she's just being random for the sake of random. In places, it might even be counter-intuitive. The opening track "Chloe in the Afternoon" repeats its title phrase in a clipped, wedged-together way that you wouldn't do by accident. Much of the album has a quiet, funky slant to it, like "Surgeon," "Dilettante" or "Neutered Fruit," which also has what sounds like a gospel choir beneath it, or a synthetic facsimile. In these places, the album reminds me of Bowie's work in plastic soul, circa "Golden Years" and "Fame." The pulsing wah-funk coda of "Dilettante" is one of the album's most enjoyable side trips. Elsewhere she opens up dark, XX-like fits of soulful quiet, like "Champagne Year."

When the album develops a galloping pace, as it does on "Northern Lights" or "Hysterical Strength," it really gets a good thing going. The climax of "Surgeon" is one of many great examples of repetition with growing intensity. Every so often it will find a direction with a song and pursue it, like the synth break in the title track, which feels like restless pacing in thought, bridging into a very intense second half ("If I ever meet the dirty policeman who roughed you up...") which showcases the performative qualities of her vocal.

For me, the finest cut on the album is "Cruel," which has every aspect you might enjoy about the album in microcosm. St. Vincent's voice is in its finest form in the chorus, joined with a crisp, grasshopper riff that grows ever more unstable, until it's a lawnmower. It even has a bit that sounds perversely like the Andrews Sisters. The same (minus the bit about the Andrews Sisters) could also be said about the thunder-and-lightning "Cheerleader." If "indie rock" is a genre, and it's what St. Vincent does, then it might be defined by taking prog rock's capability to stretch beyond normal instrumentation and structure, but to compact those extreme constructions into a 4-minute pop song. Tracks like "Year of the Tiger" create their own strange worlds, and the album strings them together on those shared moods, themes and ideas.

I like the way St. Vincent does things. Her voice is great: at times vulnerable, defiant, or prophetic. On many tracks, like "Northern Lights" and "Cheerleader," she reaches positively operatic levels of expression. The music sets a messy, often abrasive, or else grandiose and imposing landscape on a solid basis of clean pulsing funk. What St. Vincent has here is a very driven desire to have things her way, to break free from the trappings of the norm.

As I said, I'm always less about what an album says than how it says it. Whatever this album says, it does so with extreme personality. There's no mistaking it for anything else. It reminds me of Stephen Malkmus & The Jicks' Mirror Traffic, the way it creates a language of its own. If it's enough to recommend an album because it is interesting just to hear the way it all fits together, then I can do that here. But luckily, this isn't just a curious piece of auteur indie pop. It's also a damn good piece of music that is a joy to listen to the whole way through. It can be a bit alienating, but gratifying to sit down and figure out. Those various pieces combine into a full statement worth getting to know.

Buy this album now! iTunes Canada // iTunes USA // Amazon.ca // Amazon.com