St. Vincent
St. Vincent
5/5

St. Vincent doesn’t take selfies. It’s hardly believable, one might think, while gazing at her latest self-titled album’s cover and locking eyes with Annie Clarke sitting on a throne, looking like she’s about to invade another planet. “It makes me feel empty inside to take a picture of myself at an event, like, ‘Isn’t my life cool?”, she explains. Instead, Clarke prefers projecting her inner world onto her records and her fourth LP excels at just this.

Album-opener, ‘Rattlesnake’, does not symbolize anything unintelligibly deep; essentially, it’s just naked, terrified Annie fleeing from a snake. St. Vincent then turns into an even more honest narration. ‘Prince Johnny’ is more of an intimate lullaby with Clarke expressing her doleful feelings of having a self-destructing friend and in ‘I Prefer Love’ she makes an absolutely bold and straightforward statement of ‘preferring your love to Jesus’. Indeed, the fact that the upright sincerity on these songs has been skilfully turned into a well-written, raw, and captivating piece of music which is wrapped around Annie’s impeccable lively vocal is what makes this record loveable, not to mention that throughout the album she constantly reminds us of her imposing guitar deftness with craggy, buzzing solos.

Fundamentally, St. Vincent appears to be a radiant celebration of Clarke’s ability to expose her thoughts and emotions in such an enthralling aural figure that it becomes undeniably clear that her life is actually “cool”.

Stepan Nilov