Annie, Get Your Gun
By Kim Bellware in Arts & Entertainment on Oct 5, 2011 3:00PM
Photo by Jim Kopeny
To scare the monsters out
With our dear daddy's Smith and Wesson
We've got to teach them all a lesson
Don't move
Don't Scream
Or we will have to shoot
On "The Bed" from 2009's Actor, Annie Clark (St. Vincent to the rest of us) sings about squeezing a few rounds into some monsters in such a pretty way, the subversive feel hardly registers at first. Much like the saucer-eyed, Disney princess-voiced artist herself, the loveliness of Clark's songs belied their darker meanings. The scuzzy guitars and fascinating arrangements created just the right tension with Clark's smooth, unthreatening voice.
Two years later, Clark has returned with Strange Mercy, but this time instead of showing us her darker side, she's telling us--about her anger, her aggression (oh, and she's covering Big Black).
Talent-wise, Clark earns nothing but our praise: she creates fantastic musical arrangements and is a virtuosic guitarist with a beautiful voice. But when it comes to the direction she's headed with Strange Mercy, something feels off, maybe even gimmicky. Just like comedies that get cheap laughs by making prim old ladies cuss and tell blue jokes, there's something that seems a little hollow about Clark's insistence that she's as aggro as an Atomizer-era Steve Albini.
Strange Mercy tackles some darker imagery (listen for the S&M references) but doesn't do so with nearly as much skill or grace as Clark's earlier work. The guitars are louder, harder and full of overdrive; they seem to sound angrier than Clark does on most of the new songs.
Clark, a former jazz geek (her aunt and uncle are jazz duo Tuck & Patti) did her stints in The Polyphonic Spree and one of Sufjan Stevens' backup singers before striking out on her own. In her first two albums she did well to define a style that was both strong and seemingly true to herself. Strange Mercy might be another layer of Clark that we have yet to understand, but for now, we'll need some convincing to see that this grittier, angrier St. Vincent goes more than skin-deep.
St. Vincent plays tonight, October 5, at Metro, 3730 N Clark, 9 p.m., sold out