St Vincent - Daddy’s Home

The Guardian 0

(Caroline/Loma Vista)
Channelling 70s New York funk and her father’s release from prison, the ever brilliant Annie Clark loosens up on her engagingly soulful sixth album

Annie “St Vincent” Clark may exaggerate the detail, tell oblique stories or get a little carried away in the dressing-up box, but her work is always packed with emotional veracity. One of Clark’s reputations – for hiding her truths behind elaborate personae – is a little undeserved.

Over the course of five albums, all increasingly assured, St Vincent has often laid her world perfectly bare. Young Lover, from her last high-concept, hot-pink tour de force, Masseduction (2017), found Clark’s then-significant other in a bathtub in Paris, unconscious. The song felt like reportage; at the time, Clark was dating a supermodel. Her howl of pain was visceral. “Wake up young lover, I thought you were dying!”

Related: St Vincent: ‘I’d been feral for so long. I was sort of in outer space’

Sat May 08 13:00:51 GMT 2021

The Guardian 0

(Loma Vista Recordings)
Playing with identity and touching on family matters, Annie Clark’s sixth album with wilfully twisted musical backing is hugely impressive

The backstory of Annie Clark’s sixth album as St Vincent already feels well-worn. We live in an age of prurient interest in – and boundless opinion-giving about – celebrities’ personal lives: announcing that the title of Daddy’s Home referred to her father’s release from prison after a 10-year stretch for stock manipulation was bound to have an overshadowing effect.

Only the title track concerns her father’s imprisonment and release, although his presence lurks over the album in more subtle ways. Its sound was apparently inspired by his record collection, which evidently majored in the early 70s. The whole album is liberally dressed with a synthesised sitar sound that cropped up on dozens of the era’s soul singles, from Freda Payne’s Band of Gold to the Stylistics’ You Are Everything. There are dabblings in the fingerpicked acoustic style of the era’s confessional singer-songwriters, the mock-showtune stylings of Harry Nilsson and Randy Newman and the electric piano-driven funk of Donny Hathaway or Stevie Wonder. Anyone with a passing acquaintance with Pink Floyd’s most successful album can’t fail to notice the influence of its more languid moments on Live in the Dream, which comes complete with the none-more-Floydian lyric, “Welcome child, you’re free of the cage / Trying to seem sane makes you seem so strange”.

Related: St Vincent: ‘I’d been feral for so long. I was sort of in outer space’

Thu May 13 11:00:26 GMT 2021