All Born Screaming

Saint Vincent

All Born Screaming

Virgin Music Group

April 30, 2024
Web Exclusive

By Nicholas Russell

Annie Clark wants to play guitar. This has been evident since her days at Berklee College of Music in Boston in the early 2000s, when she dropped out and toured with The Polyphonic Spree and, shortly after, Sufjan Stevens. Starting out on her own during the indie-folk-lo-fi miasma of the mid-aughts, Clark's 2007 debut LP Marry me, released under the St. Vincent, melding choral choruses and the kind of soft vocals, honest, turns of phrase that fit a coffee shop playlist with Regina Spektor and Andrew Bird. Still, beneath the striped scarf, the playfulness was the kind of instrumental virtuosity and hard riffing that comes from classically training and listening to Pantera. Marry me foregrounded Clark's melodic, flexible vocal range, with beautiful and complex arrangements to elevate it. But since 2009 Actor, listeners have seen the rock god shredding that she so often transforms into during her live shows. This is the truest persona of St. Vincent, no matter how radically the look changed between records, no matter how carefully the performance style was studied between tours.

All Born Screaming, the new album from St. Vincent, removes any consideration of a grand, overriding aesthetic narrative and puts the formidable musician at its center. Clark's previous record, in 2021 dad's house, turned his acoustic and physical costume into a pastiche of 1970s New York, complete with chic heroine makeup, Steely Dan-lite backing vocals and a tortured paean to underground misfits à la Candy Darling. The results were mixed, an increasingly common occurrence for St. Vincent since her 2014 self-titled album has perfectly executed the development of the idiosyncratic stage persona and conceptual musical experimentation she's sought to renew with each record. Saint Vincent it was also the last time Clarke seemed so intent on making irresistible hits.

Which it seems to do All Born Screaming a return to form, a course correction. Except audiences have never seen this version of St. Vincent, backed by Dave Grohl and Josh Freese on thunderous drums, with Cate Le Bon on bass and vocals, Clark indulges in everything from Nine Inch Nails -adjacent industrial pop to beachy one-drop riffs from ska to guitar which unexpectedly bring Soundgarden and Tool to mind. Thematically, the verses on All Born Screaming revolve around romantic love found and lost, as in the then-simmering bombshell “Reckless” and head-nodding “Flea,” the rampant social disillusionment of the mocking “Broken Man,” and Clark's ever-present search for belonging as a queer woman and an artist, as in “So Many Planets” and “Sweetest Fruit.”

And yet, for the better, this version of St. Vincent comes without many obstacles for a clever guise. All Born Screaming it sounds like a grab bag of influences and sounds, a loose assortment for Clark to rummage through and play with. Part of this stems from the fact that, for the first time in her career, Clarke produced the album herself, forgoing the narcotic wash of synths favored by Jack Antonoff, who produced dad's house and of 2017 Massage. Every instrument shines clearly All Born ScreamingIts 10 tracks, a jungle gym through which Clark screams, growls and pleads before losing the vocals entirely and turning her gaze back to the guitar. Especially in a landscape littered with over-the-top full-length albums with muddy conceptual ambitions and lackluster instrumentation, All Born Screaming it excites for its immediacy, its momentum and, above all, its repeatability. God rest Saint Vincent. Long live Annie Clark. (www.ilovestvincent.com)

Author Rating: 8/10