St. Vincent - a.k.a. Annie Clark;

it was all too period piece schtick without strong enough songs to make it work - St V in her 1970s clothes with her soulful Black background singers. Not bad but not great either.

my wife haaaated it on the same grounds. I was more forgiving, this kind of image-roleplaying stuff no longer seems as impactful as it did in the 70's or 80's when Bowie and others did it, it def. comes across as a gimmick, but it also doesn't bother me that much. but I would have liked the songs to be a little stronger.

The problem I have with image/aesthetic is that if the songs are good then it doesn't matter what the artist is wearing - they could be wearing a potato sack. If the songs are really amazing you're not even going to notice. But if the songs aren't good enough then a deliberate stylised image seems to highlight the deficiencies in the music.
It reminds me of some interview advice I got from a colleague. They said that I should wear a red tie in an interview "so that you stand out and the interviewer remembers you". The colleague meant well but even at the time I thought that if that was the only reason I got hired then it probably meant I wasn't very suitable for the role, and that a better strategy would be to impress in the interview with my suitability for the job.
There were a lot of glam rock era bands who looked the business but whose music wasn't exciting enough. On the other hand there were bands who were really good but looked comically fuck-awful (Slade to the point where the Reeves & Mortimer parody is basically them pretending to be Slade with slightly exaggerated Brummie accents). And there's the whole 'The Decline of Western Civilization Part II: The Metal Years' thing of hair bands spending more time picking out clothes then they did writing songs.
One other thing, if you're going for a particular look then commit to it. St Vincent looks like she's wearing a party shop wig. And it's back to Bowie again but even when he was a teenager pretending to be a Mod he put in more effort.

St Vincent looks like she's wearing a party shop wig.

Yeah, but this is half the point. It's part of the ancient aesthetic strategy of drawing attention to the fact that you're "wearing a costume" / "playing a role" by doing it badly and obviously, on purpose. I think it's cowardly, confusing insincerity with irony and giving the performer a way of distancing themselves from the thing they're attempting, so they've got an out if it fails, but it's very common in super-white indie music.

this is the best thread on ilm

"saint joni ain't no phony / smoking reds where furry sang the blues"

godawful

sorry to add to the pile-on

I'm listening to "The Melting of the Sun" and wondering if this is her take on the Lana Del Rey aesthetic

I just started paying attention to the lyrics and I would like to set my face on fire

still not feeling her music/schtick. then again I haven't really checked her releases. was turned off by her 2014 SNL performance in which she did some stage moves that looked copped from Mick Karn.
second half here: https://vimeo.com/133923846
too cutesy and mannered/studied by half.

then again it doesn't bother me when David Byrne uses weird choreography (so must be the music?)

"I'm listening to "The Melting of the Sun" and wondering if this is her take on the Lana Del Rey aesthetic"

Jack Antanoff

and Virginia O'Brien did 'frozen face' soooo much better

Ok the lyrics are pretty cringe on Melting of the Sun but I really like it musically. Gene Clark No Other vibes

+Gainsbourg Cannabis soundtrack

I just started paying attention to the lyrics and I would like to set my face on fire

― Dana Jel Pey (DJP), Monday, 5 April 2021 14:13 (two hours ago) link

I turned this on in the background and was like "this isn't so bad I don't understand what everyone is...oh my god"

My Marilyn shot her heroin
"Hell," she said, "It's better than abuse"

jesus christ!!

I scrolled down to the next bridge and wish I hadn't

A Bridge Too Far

Can't wait to see how many girls adopt "benzo beauty queen" as a tagline.

pretty good cover, but i miss the organ hook after 'might as well be melting on the sun'

byrne was a clear influence on her adopting all the choreography since she started doing it after their collab album + tour that featured heavy choreography (which was kinda a conceptual dry run for byrne's american utopia tour)

it's just a shame she's not very good at both that & her character stuff, none of it is compelling at all. it doesn't even come across as like, knowingly mediocre as someone suggested but if it did that would probably be even worse.

I do really like her signature guitar, esp the fact they actually did something new and not just as nth generation derivative of a trad model/body style

I haven't listened to this but I'm sure it sucks ass

I watched her SNL performance and immediately thought she was aping cokehead Bowie phase but like it was missing the saxophones or the songwriting and also I kept wondering what the backup singers thought of her music.

Her 2017 album is fantastic imo

I love all of her old stuff and the new first single off the new album. This thread is making me nervous tho.

I liked the 2017 album at the time but I never find myself revisiting it. But she's someone I'm always going to check out; she may just be in a phase that does nothing for me now. I'm sure she'll do something I like a lot again some day.

According to my Facebook feed, St Vincent’s core audience is now “Berklee jazz professors”

her lyrics being as bad they are as on "the melting of the sun" is nothing new though, see "pills", "digital witness", etc.

According to my Facebook feed, St Vincent’s core audience is now “Berklee jazz professors”

Wait, really?

That’s based on the one dude raving about her SNL performance, to be fair

one said she’s a minx this one time.

obv i still can’t get over that thread origin story, everyone else since then is just pantomiming and shadow casting.

Dana Jel Pey (DJP) at 8:29 5 Apr 21

According to my Facebook feed, St Vincent’s core audience is now “Berklee jazz professors

she's definitely been on the guitar magazine radar for a minute

I like the layering of the guitars with the weird bends in the bridge of "Melting of the Sun" - that's a cool effect. song is ok otherwise, I prefer her with more energy

She’s always pushing uncommon aesthetic choices in her sound, but I don’t care for the specific aesthetic she going for this time and honestly, it sounds like she doesn’t either.

I appreciate the commitment from these two singles and performances so far but it’s a very niche sort of style that only a dozen of people might even want to hear revived. It’s like retelling a joke and killing it in the process.

her sound this time is just throwing a 70s aesthetic over her usual sound, like the bassline on "pay your way in pain" is the same sort of thing she's done plenty of times before (like "rattlesnake") but she's got electric piano and some backing vocalists over the top this time to make it sound 70s

she's the worst

I contend that musicians adjusting to "having been lauded" can be disorienting to them as songwriters, and they sometimes their subsequent work suffers from self-ironizing and self-critique. It's like a mid-career crisis. I'm really happy that tUnE-yArDs emerged from this wilderness of confusion this year

I'll give her this, it's certainly an idiosyncratic response to her dad getting out of prison

wait what

https://www.nylon.com/entertainment/st-vincent-detailed-daddys-home-in-an-interview

er, just read the original interview it's referencing

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2021/mar/04/st-vincent-id-been-feral-for-so-long-i-was-sort-of-in-outer-space

fgti makes an interesting point, although I don't know how closely it applies to St. Vincent. It makes me wonder about a thread, "Musicians whose music was damaged by prior acclaim/success".

She discusses his incarceration, the delusions of love – and why she remains as perverse as ever

lol, this subhed just makes me think of the chris fleming routine about her. "those aren't freaks, st. vincent. those are attractive people with heavily-vetted idiosyncrasies"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ugm_QuQ5RbY

This was/is A Thing over the last decade or so; putting on a blonde wig and becoming a new character, invariably based in New York. In Bat For Lashes' case she was 'Pearl' I'm sure there were others.

"Perhaps Pearl fitted better in New York than I did. I think Pearl was my way to deal with the disappointment of New York not being what I thought it was going to be. And so she was kind of like an art project I created, by putting on a blond wig and changing my face with makeup and dressing up and taking pictures quite privately in Brooklyn at night-time. She represents a night-time, underground, quite dark and debauched side of me."

https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/acid-factory/images/e/eb/Pearl.jpg

She has never been a stoner.

from the guardian piece

you don't say

^^ Oh my, I somehow forgot about the 'Pearl' nonsense from BFL (that album was good, tough).

Same brand of wig.

I remember one show that was mostly great, but she kept going into these ridiculous long, pre-scripted monologues that kept killing the momentum.

Arhhh yes, this happened when I saw her and it was very please stop now.

Between the s/t and Masseduction I can't think of an act for whom my enthusiasm dropped so severely from album to album; not since the days of Animal Collective at least.

Loved Actor, thought "Cruel" was great, S/T was very near the top of my EOY ballot for the year. Even enjoyed the Byrne collab quite a lot. Other than the monologues, the live show was fantastic. I was a fan.

But Masseduction felt off - something false, a little pretentious and irritating about it, like those live monologues birdistheword mentioned upthread. Something about it was trying too hard, like a guest at a party trying to impress people by making grand, outlandish claims about themselves. There was something "cocainey" about it (not that I'm insinuating anything about SV at all, it just came off that way). The humility and nuance of Actor was all but gone, replaced, ironically, with an actorly persona.

Not so much in the music as the execution, I can't get into the recent stuff for much the same reasons I can't get into Lana Del Rey. I'm totally into performers adopting personae to augment their music and to find new angles into their own style, but with SV all it seems to do is obfuscate the artist herself (who is interesting) with a less interesting veil.

it's funny - this seems to be the minority opinion in general but mine is the exact opposite of that (didn't like the early albums at all, think masseduction is by far the best thing she's ever recorded). haven't gotten into this yet/may never, but only because I don't like the music it's trying to pastiche