St. Vincent
The Iveagh Gardens
Thursday, July 8th, 2015
Desmond Traynor
Full disclosure from
the outset: I have only a passing acquaintance (video clips, radio, occasional
TV) with the four solo album oeuvre
of St. Vincent, a.k.a. Annie Clark, have never sat down and listened to one of
her records, and certainly couldn’t be designated a dyed-in-the-wool fan. For
this reason, this review will not feature a chronological trawl through her
discography, with instant song recognition, and comparisons of studio versions
with live performances, but will instead be an impressionistic account of the
evening (and those will be first impressions) by a seasoned gig-goer. I suspect
this lack of specific knowledge-based approach may disgruntle some of her more
infatuated aficionados. Why attend,
then? Well, interest was partly piqued by the fact that David Byrne clearly
rates her, the pair having collaborated on, and subsequently extensively
toured, 2012’s Love This Giant. Also,
TTA’s editor asked me, even if I might not necessarily be the best-equipped man
for the job.
The band take the stage clad in de rigueur black, Matt Johnson on drums
and Daniel Mintseris on keyboards to the rear, with lieutenant Toko Yasuda (ex-Enon),
interchanging guitars and keyboards, front and stage-left of the boss lady.
Centre stage is a three-tier podium, reminiscent of the pink throne on which
St. Vincent resides on the cover of the eponymous most recent album, which she
will later mount. Clark is rocking a faintly dominatrix look, in a crenelated, spiky catsuit, to
which she makes self-deprecating reference in the course of her set, which
doesn’t quite work, perhaps due to her diminutive size. Now don’t get me wrong:
I’m all for attractively-figured women in black leather catsuits and heels (to
say nothing of assistants sporting slit mini-skirts) – indeed Diana Rigg’s Emma
Peel in The Avengers was my first
small screen sexual epiphany – but the cool authority Clark is aiming for with
her aloofness is somehow undercut by the wind-up automaton-like ‘two little
maids are we’ baby steps she indulges in with Yasuda, alternated with
exaggeratedly giant prancing around the stage.
In fact, it is the stiff, stilted, stylised, overly
rehearsed, overly choreographed and ultimately fake theatricality of the show
that is most off-putting, less alienation effect than laughter lounge turn. She
may be aiming for Strong Woman, but it comes across as a cross between watching
your offspring get their ‘look-at-me’ moment in the school play, and Top Of The Pop’s Legs & Co going
through one of their more risqué
routines.
None of this is helped by the lengthy,
self-consciously arty, pre-prepared monologues with which she intersperses the
performance – when she does decide to address us – which riff on her
commendable fascination with the oddity of everyday life, but unfortunately are
designed to stress the commonality of all human experience by utilising the
second person singular instead of the first, presumably in an attempt to collapse
the difference between the two. Again, this is not successful, if only because
of the singularity of individual human experience. Not all of us wanted to fly
as a kid, Annie, and even if we did, not all of us used pizza boxes as wings:
that’s your story, not ours. So, aside from these tedious longueurs interrupting the momentum of the music, they are just a
slightly more quirky indie variation on the familiar Lady Gaga/Kate
Perry/Taylor Swift self-help exhortations, for a slightly older fan base. (One
wonders which is worse: inviting audience members to deny the uniqueness of
their own experience by acknowledging that ‘we are all the same’, or advising
them to ‘just be yourself’ as they adopt ‘personalised’ identical style and
clothing patterns as members of a mass audience? Perhaps both are equally
laughable.)
And what of the music? Given my relative
inability to distinguish discrete songs, the overall sound could be described
as vacuous ’80s synth-pop, incongruously juxapositioned with angular,
fuzzed-out, Robert Fripperish off-kilter guitar solos. While I have been
assured by those who know that beneath the mostly pristine smoothness of the
beats lurks, à la Steely Dan and
Mircodisney, a subversive wordsmith’s sensibility, whatever about any lyrical
edge she may possess (‘Cheerleader’ aside, largely indecipherable in these
circumstances, despite an impeccable sound job), musically she is much more
Duran Duran/Spandau Ballet New Romanticism and less the Kraftwerk/Berlin Bowie
Krautrock she might imagine herself.
All of the above gives the distinct
impression that Clark is very concerned with letting us know how clever she is.
And maybe she is, for all I know. But, of course, clever people don’t go around
showing off how clever they are, if only because it makes them look not as
clever as they think they are. The goal of synchronised choreography, of
example, is not to make the audience realise how hard it is to get right, but
to make them feel how apparently easy it is to execute. St. Vincent’s cracks
show; she’s obvious despite herself.
On the plus side, she is undoubtedly good at
her job, in that she is a very good singer and an excellent guitarist, and is
confident on stage. But while she is professional to the core, her work and its
presentation seem to lack some intangible quality. Call it ‘soul’ if you like
little words with big meanings; say ‘spontaneity’ if you prefer longer words of
less import. As it stands, I can think of a slew of other youngish,
contemporary female artists better deserving of all the attention currently
being directed St. Vincent’s (32) way: Anna Calvi (34), Agnes Obel (34), Julia
Holter (30), Angel Olsen (28), Sharon Van Etten (34), Tiny Vipers (31), Haim (29,
26, 23) and, Queen Of Them All, Joanna Newsom (33). EMA (Erika M Anderson) (?),
in particular, has in Past Life Martyred
Saints produced one of the most stunning, striking and extraordinary debuts
so far this millennium, and a fairly decent follow up in The Future’s Void, to relatively little media fanfare.
Given pre-show hype and expectation, I left this
concert feeling curiously disappointed. I left before the end.
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