About.com Rating
Chin-Scratchin', Headachin' Geekery
Annie Clark has always made heady music: comically self-aware, sonically complex, blessed with bona fide chops. But, on Strange Mercy, her third St. Vincent album, Clark crosses over from heady to outright chin-scratchin'. Though Clark told me she "was way more interested in emotional content" after 2009's Actor was he time to "flex [her] cerebral chops,'" that sentiment isn't reflected in Strange Mercy's music.
At all.
Clark has never sounded more eggheaded, more experimental, more cerebral than this; the orchestral pirouettes and conceptual pantomimes of Actor seeming positively quaint in comparison.
Though there's still melody and choruses enough to play at being pop music, the LP's loaded with detail, density, and studio nerdery. It takes the geekiness of Clark's history —her jazz-nerd childhood, her Sufjan apprenticeship, her art-rock jones, her current association with David Byrne— and amplifies it across 42 minutes of knotty complexity and headache-inducing hyperactivity.
Taking Many Notes
Lead single "Surgeon" sets the spirit: incisively ironic lyrics (its cute opening line, "I spent the summer on my back," immediately introducing the surgery/sex symbolism) matched to advanced-listening composition. It starts as synthy ballad, but soon is attacked from within —by wild West African guitar licks, tone-perverting effects, furious flute filigrees, discordant orchestral whorls— all whilst gearing up through increasingly frantic time signatures.
Intellectually speaking, "Surgeon" is a workout, but emotionally, you don’t have to sweat. And that serves as effective eulogy for the whole LP. It's fun to pick apart the lyrics; especially the totemic presence of the word "America," which is naked in the skronky, madcap "Cheerleader" and owed one in "Year Of The Tiger," a balladic moment which still finds time for doomy synths and effects-blasted guitar chops.
Whilst the friction found between the component parts and the uneasy, ever-shifting approach to arrangements don't make for easy listening, they make for interesting listening. For students of sound, donning headphones and carefully tuning into the manifold of components parts in the odd, chugging "Chloe" or the deranged space-funk of "Neutered" will be a bout of fascinating note-taking. But that sense —of needed scholastic aptitude to truly appreciate Strange Mercy— is what makes the album an experience you put yourself through, rather than throw yourself into.
If all the mentions of chin-scratching and note-taking didn't tip you off, the eulogy for Strange Mercy effectively reads so: listening to it feels more like work than leisure.
Record Label: 4AD
Release Date: September 13, 2011