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They remember 1991 in Texas for the Luby massacre, when George Hennard’s pick-up ended up on the window of a club and he started shooting, killing twenty-three people and wounding about thirty. Annie Clark was nine years old and her life had already changed when Nirvana’s Nevermind ended up in her hands. In her bedroom, posters of Frank Zappa and King Crimson stared at her as she pretended to be a rock star with her red plastic guitar. A few years later, the instrument would become real and she would start playing Jethro Tull and her beloved Robert Fripp on it. Then, she would take her stage name in a verse of There She Goes, My Beautiful World, a song written by Nick Cave with his Bad Seeds which at a certain point talks about the poet Dylan Thomas, who died drunk in the hospital of St Vincent.
In almost two decades, Clark has released seven albums and each has been an artistic reincarnation, applying David Bowie’s teachings in an excellent way. Marry Me in 2007 presented an original singer-songwriter skilled in mixing various sounds, made even more personalized by the writing ability achieved in Actor, two years later. In 2011’s Strange Mercy her art pop is even more in focus, so much so that it earned the attention of David Byrne, with whom she released the eclectic Love This Giant the following year. The former Talking Heads’ impact on Clark helps refine the magnetic innovative force of St Vincent, released in 2014, the sensual latex sound of Masseduction, from 2017, and the 70s-flavored intimacy of Daddy’s Home, released in 2021.
In the solitude of the studio
All Born Screaming begins with the dark progression of Hell Is Near. Reckless slowly advances from an intimate twilight into a growing tension that explodes in the distorted violence of the finale. Clark’s approach to production is contained in the psychotic Broken Man: the sound of the album was born in the solitude of the studio, handling the mixer controls and, as in the case of the song, passing sounds through old Japanese tape machines.
Cate Le Bon
Another constant presence on the album is that of British singer-songwriter Cate Le Bon, who also appears as the co-writer of Big Time Nothing, a hip hop track that redefines St Vincent’s chameleonic ability. Her, in the James Bond atmosphere of Violent Times, becomes a desperate need for love. The intimate and meditative he Power’s Out recounts the electrical outage in a city that also turns out to be an emotional blackout, while the stroboscopic Sweetest Fruit opens with the line “my Sophie climbed onto the roof to see the moon better”, an elegy for the late Scottish producer who died in 2021. So Many Planets represents Clark’s lyrical peak with lines like “I’m out of fashion, I’ve got God on my tail”, “I’m dropping promises like they were H-bombs”. The final title track is an almost seven-minute suite that holds the concept of the entire album: we were born screaming, therefore protesting because, perhaps, we already know that we need to fully live the only life we have. A life that allowed St Vincent to close a circle, hosting Dave Grohl of the Foo Fighters and his beloved Nirvana in some songs.