Plumbiferous Media

St. Vin­cent, oth­er­wise known as Annie Clark, popped into the spot­light after tour­ing with Suf­jan Stevens fol­low­ing the release of Marry Me, her first full length. Her sec­ond LP, Actor, which was released on the fifth, is filled with the inter­est­ing odd­i­ties she has become known for since her first album. But while Marry Me made very suc­cess­ful use of these quirks, Actor is a lit­tle more hit and miss.

Annie Clark’s haunt­ing, ephemeral vocals are at their best on Actor. The bizarre tales and melodies of the album are well com­ple­mented by her rich voice, which presents a con­stant, enthralling line above the instru­men­tals. The power of Clark’s voice becomes espe­cially clear on “Actor Out of Work,” where the con­stantly chang­ing musi­cal qual­ity of her voice cre­ates a shift­ing mesh which gives the track its amaz­ing eloquence.

How­ever, at the same time, Clark’s voice is occa­sion­ally swal­lowed up by the some­what dom­i­nat­ing instru­men­tals, par­tially due to its con­stant qual­ity. While Actor cer­tainly ben­e­fits from a care­ful blend between instru­men­tals and vocals, in some places this blend has been over-calculated, slightly drown­ing the vocals. Nev­er­the­less, for the most part Clark’s voice shines through even the best parts of the album - a bea­con of light in the cen­ter of a peri­od­i­cally mys­ti­fy­ing album.

Though Annie Clark has an won­der­ful voice, what is most audi­ble in the album is the odd­ity of the instru­men­tals. While the strangely inserted frag­ments of lines, incred­i­bly heavy dis­tor­tion or hefty sta­tic, odd arrange­ments, and unex­pected unisons cer­tainly make for some very strong tracks such as “Actor out of Work” and “Mar­row,” there are a num­ber of tracks that lose enough phras­ing and directed pres­sure that they don’t quite work out, even though they remain inter­est­ing (“The Neigh­bors” and “The Party” are two examples).

What is quite inter­est­ing then, is that while St. Vin­cent loves to spe­cial­ize in eclec­tic musi­cal absur­di­tudes, the strongest track, “Black Rain­bow,” is the sim­plest track musi­cally. What makes it so excel­lent is the con­stant press­ing force (both dynamic and in the highly repet­i­tive beat­ing and strum­ming that is present through­out the entire track) that dri­ves the track emo­tion­ally while the var­i­ous solois­tic lines - the string sec­tion, the voice, and what sounds like a theremin - are free to pro­vide excel­lent melody. Of course, this can­not be taken as a sug­ges­tion as to how the album should have been con­structed, as the entirely dif­fer­ent pre­ceed­ing track, “Actor out of Work” is most likely the next most potent track; there seems to be no gen­eral way what­so­ever of deci­pher­ing whether a track is good or sim­ply decent based on its con­nec­tion to another track.

The lyrics of Actor are, quite sim­ply, as strange and won­der­ful as the vocals. Clark hasn’t lost a bit of the cre­ative spirit of her last album, Marry Me, and she puts her excel­lent voice to good use singing the curi­ous tales of Actor. Begin­ning her com­mand to “make a black hole blacker” on “The Strangers,” Clark has inter­twined a mix­ture of story, metaphor, and poetry into Actor. It’s impos­si­ble not to smile at a line like “Des­per­ate don’t look good on you/Neither does your virtue,” and even harder not to imag­ine the images behind “Black Rain­bow” or “Laugh­ing With a Mouth of Blood.” After vocals, lyrics are what Clark does best, and she’s cer­tainly suc­ceeded on Actor.

Though Actor is cer­tainly not a per­fect album, it has enough cap­ti­vat­ing aspects among its charm­ing dis­ar­ray that it’s cer­tainly a decent one. Clark’s vocals are as excel­lent as usual. Her lyrics are well-written, com­plex and yet ele­gant. The instru­men­tals are inter­est­ing and occa­sion­ally strik­ingly unique. What Actor suf­fers from, then, is a slight over­dose of the exper­i­men­tal tone which per­me­ates the album, and often a lack of direc­tion. All the same, it’s cer­tainly a solid album - just not an excel­lent one.

This post is tagged 70-79, St. Vincent