St Vincent - Masseduction

Drowned In Sound 90

Touted as her 'pop' moment (the album is co-produced by Jack Antonoff, who has previously worked with pop luminaries Lorde and Taylor Swift), right from the off - with ‘Hang On Me’s pulsing bass and drowsy, sensual synth melody matched by the erotic intensity of Annie’s vocal – it is clear that something special is in the offing.

With a palpable honesty, she sings intense stories of lust (‘Savior’, playing erotic stock-character dress-up as nurse, teacher, nun, with an outfit that “rides and sticks to my thighs and hips”; ‘Young Lover’ bluntly admitting: “I miss the taste of your tongue”) and love, but always skewed to the fatalistic, dangerous or gone-wrong varieties. “You and me, we’re not meant for this world”, she intones in the dramatic, gripping opener – almost revelling in the doomed nature of the affair. Key track ‘Los Ageless’ repeats, like an incantation or a plea: “How can anybody have you and lose you and not lose their mind too?” Its East Coast sister track ‘New York’ sorrowfully accepts that “You’re the only motherfucker in the city who can handle me”.

Death is hinted at, fatalistically, on several occasions, from ‘Sugarboy’s admission of a “crush on tragedy” to the apocalyptic ‘Fear the Future’ which imagines “the earth split in two”; with suicide alluded to in both ‘Smoking Section’ and ‘Young Lover’. The title track’s description of a “smiling nihilist”, though, gets closest to the heart of the album’s mood.

Which is, despite the darkness, extraordinarily uplifting. The contrast between the words which are being sung and the fabulous, synth-strewn, pulsing, riff-heavy music, the instantly-moreish melodies and the gorgeously-delivered vocals is dramatic, but somehow not jarring or dissonant. Take the Giorgio Moroder-slick disco and glossy vocals of ‘Sugarboy’, say, dragging its tragedy onto the dancefloor, or the frenetic ‘Pills’: both confessional and strangely comedic.

At the album’s mid-point is one of its finest moments, and one that somehow stands alone. ‘Happy Birthday, Johnny’ is simple, straightforward, unadorned and quite, quite beautiful. Presumably sung to the same Johnny as the ‘Prince Johnny’ on 2014’s St Vincent, it combines a simple melody with a hugely touching tribute/apology/message to a – what: friend? brother? ex? – who is clearly troubled and struggling. It’s lovely, and so intimate that you almost feel like an eavesdropper for listening to it, as the singer admits, baldly: “Of course I blame me”.

But such is the quality of the whole album, from its set-piece bangers like ‘Sugarboy’ and ‘Los Ageless’ to the gentler, more elegiac moments of ‘New York’ and ‘Smoking Section’ (“What could be better than love?”), it’s that treasured thing – a piece of art that works in its entirety. You wouldn’t want one track or note to be changed or left out. It’s a genuine masterpiece: complex, funny, sexy, bleak, uplifting, inspiring and enthralling from start to finish.

The Guardian 80

(Loma Vista/Caroline International)

Mechanical beats and abrasive synths underpinned by producer Jack Antonoff’s feedback-pocked soundbed-of-nails: Annie Clark’s sixth album as St Vincent is not immediately inviting. But it is fascinating, sometimes grimly so, with Clark relating scenes from a relationship with a drugged-up Young Lover. But the frank confessions – of transgressive desire, pathological anxiety and romantic rejection – that pepper Masseduction transcend gossipy intrigue. (Inevitably, people will assume some of the material is inspired by her breakup with ex-girlfriend Cara Delevingne.) Sonically, the record gradually unfurls into something similarly captivating though, as Clark ditches the guitar rock for pop that is rich, nuanced and constantly surprising. Single songs journey across genres – Pills, for example, begins resembling a bass-heavy remix of a nursery rhyme and ends up a big ballad with a Kamasi Washington sax section – while bizarrely amusing ingredients are continually added to the pot, from parodically funky synth lines to shrill vocal gymnastics that would have Mariah Carey cowering on her chaise lounge.

The Guardian 80

(Caroline International)
With giddy highs and dark lows, Annie Clark’s new album is the mischievous singer’s most direct yet

In 1978, the porn mag Hustler ran one of the most infamous magazine covers in history – a woman’s legs sticking out of a meat-grinder. It played on the idea that the publication treated women like sides of beef (something a Larry Flynt cover line disingenuously protested against).

Annie Clark doesn’t actually reproduce this specific image in any of the high-concept artwork for her fifth album. But in the recent video for Los Ageless – a tremendous song about a city of surface and surgery, boasting one of the choruses of the year – she presides over a meat grinder chewing up the word “NO” and some legs stick out of a TV; there are ample references to the objectification of female bodies in visual culture.

Related: St Vincent: ‘I’m in deep nun mode’