Annie Clark is the woman who fell to earth. In the guise of her alter-ego St. Vincent she crash-lands in Manchester tonight on the second and final date of her lightning visit to this country. These shows comprise the English leg of her Fear The Future tour. They also coincide with the release of St. Vincent’s fifth solo album MASSEDUCTION, but could just as easily be seen as a parable for the 35 year old Texan artist’s vision of future live presentations within popular culture.
In an act that probably lies somewhere between utmost conceit and supreme confidence, at these shows St. Vincent is her very own support act. Or at least The Birthday Party is; a short film that marks Annie Clark’s directorial debut. Released earlier this year as part of a new all-female horror anthology called XX, the film features a taxidermy cat, a dead husband, a rapping panda bear and a bunch of eight year old kids, one of whom is fancily dressed as a purple toilet.
Drawing loosely from the Harold Pinter play of the same name and including elements of Stanley Kubrick’s direction from The Shining, The Birthday Party packs plenty of suburban anxiety, absurdity and general weirdness into its relatively short duration. It also has the most dramatic of soundtracks – influenced in part by the late Chris Cornell of Soundgarden – which lays down an oblique marker for what will follow.
As the curtain moves slowly back, St. Vincent’s first physical appearance of the night sees her highlighted stage left in a single spotlight. Dressed in matching shocking pink PVC swimwear and thigh-length boots, she cuts an incredibly spectacular Queen of the Galaxy figure, a modern day Barbarella if you will.
St Vincent’s music is equally astonishing and at this point she is merely starting on a journey through her past. She carefully selects moments from her back pages, moving chronologically from ‘Marry Me’ (the title track from her 2007 debut album) to the highly apposite ‘Birth In Reverse’ (taken from her self-titled fourth long player, which was released some three years back) as she makes her way slowly to the other side of the stage in 10 precisely measured song-steps.
This first part of tonight’s musical performance provides a retrospective travelogue of some of the musical places St Vincent had visited prior to the advent of MASSEDUCTION. It produces a tumult of often wonderfully-skewed creative ideas, almost fully realised as the complete embodiment of art-rock progression. It is just St. Vincent, her guitar(s) and a fully supporting backing track and as she disappears behind the closing curtain at the end of ‘Birth In Reverse’ in a demonic squall of guitar you could easily be mistaken for hearing that sound as the death throes of her musical past.
One short intermission and a costume change later and St Vincent returns to perform MASSEDUCTION in its entirety and in the exact sequence of the record. By now stood on a podium in the centre of the stage and performing in the midst of a kaleidoscope of what is the most magnificently choreographed light storm, from a distance St. Vincent resembles variously a robot, an Annie Clark mannequin and a highly sexually-charged female Subbuteo player.
As it lurches from the insistent fevered pop of ‘Pills’ to the proto-funk of ‘Savior’ right through to the crystallised disco-beat of ‘Fear The Future’ the music follows similar stylistic leaps, illustrating firmly St Vincent’s global energy and her stratospheric grasp of what all live music shall probably look and sound like in the future. There does remain a nagging feeling of emotional detachment throughout the evening, though, and St. Vincent continually walks an artistic tightrope between that of securing total audience absorption and heightening the risk of their complete alienation. But on this evidence alone it is a high-wire balancing act that she manages to complete nervelessly and to absolute perfection.
Like Simone de Beauvoir before her, Annie Clark was surely made for another planet altogether. But unlike the great French author and philosopher she has not mistaken her way.
Photo credit: Simon Godley
A few more photos from this show can be found HERE
