By Peter Quincy Ng
St. Vincent’s Actor is like watching a film in Technicolor
At first glance the rather bland cover of St. Vincent’s Actor doesn’t bring much to mind. With her curly brown hair and pale white complexion, St. Vincent frontwoman Annie Clark stands lifelessly while staring off in the distance. Her sophomore album, filled with intricate little arrangements and striking ornamentations is anything but dull. Like that old saying goes: “Never judge a book by its cover”.
Annie’s talent should come to you as little surprise as her colorful history is speckled with years of touring proving multi-instrumentalist support with The Polyphonic Spree and more notably Sufjan Stevens. Actor, inspired by the scores of “Snow White” and “Stardust Memories” each track of the album brings its charms of both the delicate and destructive. The opening track “The Strangers” itself is a perfect example, as its cheery intro flutters gently with Clark’s soft and delicate voice and comes crashing down with fuzzy distorted guitars as the subject of the song becomes increasingly more evident with the constant repetition of the words “Paint the black hole blacker”.
St. Vincent’s simple yet clever repetition and wordplay is all over the album. On the anatomically correct song “Marrow”, Clark’s play on the words “Help me” gives a fun, funky and quirky vibe and even with track titles as grim as “Laughing with a Mouth of Blood” Annie’s charm never seems to fade. While “Actor Out of Work” brings it on hard with a riveting bassline and hook-heavy rhythms, “The Party” is a blissfully serene late-night ballad of heavenly proportions.
As delightful as St. Vincent’s “Disney-esque” arrangements are in “Black Rainbow” and “The Strangers” at times the little ornamentations seem to take away and almost drown out Annie’s decorous voice. Furthermore it’s disappointing to see so little guitar playing on this album compared to that of her debut release from what the Boston Globe called an “adorably spunky guitar prodigy”. Nevertheless this straightforward and appropriately named album is a true gem of modern pop-rock with such insight and creativity rarely seen in the so-called singer/songwriter genre.
Actor divx magnolia
is out May 5th, 2009 on 4AD Records
For more information: download point of no return online