St. Vincent
All Born Screaming
TOTAL PLEASURE/VMG
If Annie Clark is, in reality, a culture-sucking chameleon like her hero David Bowie, and her last album as St. Vincent—2021’s Daddy’s Home—was her ’70s R&B-flavored Young Americans, then surely the new All Born Screaming is her Scary Monsters—a bleak, noisily unamiable rocking thing filled with beastly angular guitar work, snaky, lo-fi synths, brutal crooning, and uncomfortable prose that all somehow manages to be surprisingly accessible when listened to in its entirety.
From the snotty, mean industrialism of lead single “Broken Man” to the crotchety lyrical goof-off of “Flea”; from the brittle-yet-spry funk of the title track to the noir-cinematic piss take of “Violent Times”; from the phosphorus glow of her fairly awkward tribute to the late producer SOPHIE that is “Sweetest Fruit” (which is surprisingly the focal point of controversy on an album that debuted its visual motif at the most inopportune moment imaginable) to the romantic musicality of “The Power’s Out” and its telegenic dystopia—it’s as if Clark has gathered together every good St. Vincent idea she’s ever had—from heartbroken to horrified—and went at each unsymmetrical lyric as if she was throwing axes for sport.
Self-produced without the assistance of stalwart mix-man Jack Antonoff, Clark is joined by Dave Grohl and Josh Freese (not one, but two Foo Fighting drummers) on the wondrously, aggressively propulsive tip along with Bowie’s Blackstar drummer Mark Guiliana. What was once good is now great on All Born Screaming.
