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

thought: i think, at this point, if pitchfork (or any other similar "major" publication) gives something a glowing review that's a good sign that i'll hate it.

another thought: i've given st. vincent a listen in the past because of the generally great reviews she's gotten. nothing has ever really resonated, but i've not hated anything i've heard either. this whole charade has put me off her probably for good. oh well. nothing gained, nothing lost.

i think, at this point, if pitchfork (or any other similar "major" publication) gives something a glowing review that's a good sign that i'll hate it.

I'm totally indifferent to the shit that gets reviewed favorably — it's not even that I hate it. It barely registers as music for me. These days I mostly hate-read the site when they review something I actually know about, like when Vijay Iyer puts an album out and they decide they care about jazz again, just to see all the shit they get wrong or misunderstand.

The site that best fulfills my "if you like it, I hate it" needs is Roger Ebert's old site. Their pool of critics has, collectively, the absolute worst fucking taste in movies.

Emma: I feel like we have less power than ever before. I mean, even 15 years ago, Pitchfork could put up a really terrible review and that album wouldn't be listened to. You put up a terrible review now and it actually benefits the artist. I think people are more skeptical of journalists than ever before. And that works in the corporations’ favour and bigger artists like St. Vincent's favour.

Its a shame Pitchfork can no longer destroy the corporate tyranny of... Travis Morrison

It's also just fucking wrong because old P4k used to do backboard-breaking dunks on corporate things like Jet or Jessie J or Panic at the Disco or Weezer and had no effect whatsoever, and now they're absolutely in thrall of every major label project also no no effect whatsoever

I wonder if Rick Ross ever recovered from this

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11296-trilla/

at the peak they could definitely take, for example in the case of tapes n' tapes, from playing a semi-decently attended thursday show in minneapolis to big festival appearances a month later

always heard rumors that toure` was proud of himself for "ending public enemy's hype" when he gave them a poor review for muse-sick n hour mess-age in rolling stone. and even if that's not true or embellished, it's based on some some semblance of truth. and that's pretty disappointing.

of course, now we're talking about toure` and he's always been a very reprehensible person.

i guess my point in bringing it up is that there's always going to an asshole in the mix somewhere.

if st. vincent really wanted to troll everyone hard, she'd cancel everything, shelf the album, and release an instrumental ambient album.

i think, at this point, if pitchfork (or any other similar "major" publication) gives something a glowing review that's a good sign that i'll hate it.

such as?

When checking out a record meant spending $10, there was something to her argument.

I mean we've been over every possible permutation of this argument 1 billion times, but Pitchfork is actually a bunch of largely freelance writers each with their own tastes not some monolithic entity

I don't understand why an individual who listens to an album and comes up with 20 questions is considered a "journalist" as if there was any actual research involved... the tabloid reporters who dug up the information about Clark's father's imprisonment and knocked on Clark's sister's door to confirm? then simultaneously forcibly outed Clark as a lesbian and the daughter of a jailbird in the Daily Mirror? those are journalists.

I do think I have become a much kinder journalist, as a result of cancel culture.

I'm sorry, who are these people

― 80's hair metal , and good praise music ! (DJP), Monday, May 3, 2021 4:15 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

I don't think this is an outlandish statement to make -- I definitely think over anything I write a lot more to make sure it doesn't have any connotations or plausible intentions I didn't mean. which is more criticism than journalism if we're going there, but in general I think that, on the balance, this is a positive development

ok so this 'journalist' is an idiot

just like the rest of us.

how's that new st vincent record?

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/04/arts/music/st-vincent-favorites.html

Ny Times interview piece now out mentions album title but the q and a is just on Clark’s fave art , places, albums, and her guitar

NY Times interview is by freelancer Ol*via Horn

New song:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VQ9iAlm-sJ8

Lots of fun things going on in this song. Such a good look + some incredible editing in the video.

Something something something Tori Amos.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z5rRZdiu1UE

That was my first thought, that she was attempting to recreate Coppola's The Conversation without having ever seen The Conversation, but having seen Sabotage dozens of times.

The St. Vincent guitars are really nice but they’ve gone from ~$1600 to ~$2400 real quick. (The budget Sterling one isn’t nearly as nice.)

The old model has been discontinued and the new model (which matches this album) doesn't come out until June.

"down" is actually quite nice

lol SV is a Steely Dan stan (at least for the purposes of this video)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rIpgc2BX6wU

is it possible to go to berklee and *not* be a steely stan?

those electrohome record players are $$, jealous

With the bad wig and the clothes, it's hard to tell if this is a St. Vincent interview or a "St. Vincent", the character for this cycle, interview. Although most likely it doesn't matter.

Really liking Live The Dream on the new album. There's a few other really pretty moments on here but overall it sounds a bit unfocused. I like the idea of her getting a bit more loose, I'm just not convinced the songs are there.

I learned enough on my first pass to know that by the sixth pass at least half of these songs are going to be planted deep in my brain.

first listen reaction is that this feels a lot longer than 43 minutes

Electric Sitar content A+

Once through, I like some of the warm 70s-style instrumentation and the part where she sings "Mississippi good god-damn," but I'm not hearing much in the way of melody, compelling lyrics, or variety. The last one took its time growing on me, though, so maybe I'll have the same experience here.

The whole album minus the interludes has been uploaded to the offical SV YouTube channel.

I'm not hearing much in the way of melody, compelling lyrics, or variety

^^^ I got bored and wished I was listening to actual music from the early / mid 70s. The thing is that a lot of the music from that period is not boring, but instead very dynamic and energetic. But this album is like a non drug person's idea of what being on drugs is like. Also it's so humourless. As bad as some of Lou Reed's records were in the 70s, they were often funny (sometimes unintentionally but whatever).

The album is not as bad as I thought it'd be but the 70s cosplay/fetishization feels unneccessarily forced at times, Lindsay Zoladz nails it:

Clark and her co-producer, Jack Antonoff, have clearly had fun with the creation of this finely tuned alternate universe, but at a point, its many detailed references start to feel like clutter, preventing the songs from moving too freely in their own ways. The yawning single “The Melting of the Sun” is weighed down by constant, wink-wink verbal and sonic quotations of ’70s rock; “Hello from the dark side of the moon,” Clark sings, as her guitar wolf-whistles like Steve Miller’s in “The Joker.” “Like the heroines of Cassavetes, I’m under the influence daily,” she sings, a little too on the nose, on the drifting “The Laughing Man.” One indelible highlight is the gorgeously immersive psychedelia of “Live in the Dream,” but it is also a Pink Floyd-indebted slow-burner that begins with an echoing, “Hello …” Get it? Too often, these references feel as though they’re there just for the sake of cleverness. As a result, more frequently than it invents or reveals, “Daddy’s Home” gestures.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/13/arts/music/st-vincent-daddys-home-review.html

i wasn't expecting there to be a pink floyd pastiche of all things on this, nor would i have expected one to be pretty good like it is

“Like the heroines of Cassavetes, I’m under the influence daily,”

Wyclef-level bad.

yeah thats a true groaner

review is mostly otm. i dont mind pastiche for its own sake, but she whiffs it with this imo. the songs feel lightweight, and she wants the arrangements to do most of the heavy lifting but it does the thing that weak pastiche does where there are so many references, but every 70s rock song didnt have the sound of every 70s rock song piled into it, like the sounds were all grafted in from some master list. ends up sounding creaky and strained to me, "how do you do fellow 70s kids, i was just thinking about schoolhouse rock while playing sitar with harry nilsson on soul train"

^yes but also, including that crypto cover of a Sheena Easton tune just highlights how unmemorable the rest of the melodies are. Still it’s a pleasant listen.

that was the only song that stood out to me in the initial play-through I just made myself listen through to

https://slate.com/culture/2021/05/st-vincent-daddys-home-review-annie-clark.html

An effective and compassionate pan? "There’s a larger, truer life beyond mundane facts, and the impersonal doesn’t have to be apolitical" made me gasp

Some of the criticism written about this record has been way more insightful then any of the lyrics on this record.

Carl is clear-eyed as always, and he's right that lyrics have never been her strength (which is hard to ignore when I see them quoted by fans constantly)

well written review

listened to the full thing and i have never been much of a fan so i'm a little surprised that i found it to be generally pretty good. i think probably because it's so far removed for the most part from her usual style (apart from like, the "pay your way in pain" bassline) in favour of outright 70s pastiche, and i like her reference points here much more than her previous sound. "melting of the sun" and "pay your way in pain" are among the weaker tracks so pretty weird choices as the singles

the lyrics are pretty dreadful but that's always been a huge a weakness of hers yeah so whatever

I'm finding this album very uninvolving for whatever reason. Just...the songs aren't very memorable.

i found this to be pretty unpleasant tbh, like her arch vocals and the woozy 70s keybs just do not turn into something i would want to listen to again.

Everything about the aesthetic delivery of the record has put me off it without listening to it. The Slate review I found shocking because nobody writes like that anymore - or perhaps did so before.

It's genuinely distressingly bad album cover too. Springsteen-level bad.

I saw this diminutive minx open for John Vanderslice this past Saturday night. Her fretwork is notably accomplished and while playing solo her effects pedals and samplers laid out an ample and surprisingly varied setlist.
― christoff, Monday, April 16, 2007 4:32 PM (fourteen years ago) bookmarkflaglink

also fucking lolllll