St. Vincent’s new serving of 70s psychedelic sleaze somehow manages to be excitingly fresh. In fact, it’s one of the most exciting albums I’ve heard this year.
Eccentric art rocker Annie Erin Clark (AKA St Vincent) has
always been a pretty forward-thinking artist. Her 2014 self-titled record was a
groovy rock record featuring guitars modulated to sound like synths and some fairly
out-there lyrics ranging from snorting a piece of the Berlin Wall to taking out
the garbage and masturbating. Follow-up 2017 album Masseduction was
pretty tame in comparison, taking a relatively straightforward synthpop
direction, but still sounding very contemporary.
Daddy’s Home is Annie’s first attempt at a retro
record. It’s a homage to 70s rock, pop and funk complete with woozy lap steel
guitars, chirpy wurlitzers, Motown-esque choral backing vocals and even some sitars.
I often get worried when artists go retro as its usually a sign that their
creative juices are drying up. However, this album isn’t just another late
career tribute record like Sonic Highways – Annie takes the smorgasbord
of retro sounds and cooks up some truly inventive compositions.
Most of the tracks adopt standard verse-chorus-verse-chorus
formats, but they’re built out of dense and sporadic layers of instrumentation.
Tracks like ‘The Melting Of The Sun’ and ‘Down’ can feel quite chaotic on first
listen. However, beneath the scattergun splashes of sitar and Wurlitzer are
some solid grooves and hooks that have kept me coming back. There are also some
relatively stripped-back tracks to contrast the more cluttered ones that help
to add breathing space – a prime example is mesmerising Pink-Floydy ballad ‘Live
In The Dream’, which uses a whispered delivery and twinkling synths to create a
drowsy slow-motion feel.
In addition to the creative and solid composition work, this
album also has some fantastic lyrical content. Daddy’s Home isn't just album about daddy issues, but one about abandoning responsibility. It's partially inspired by her father, who recently completed a 12 year jail sentence. For much of her adult life, she's not had a present father figure. She compares this abandonment to her own refusal to become a parent in a world where women are
only respected if they become mothers. Much of the songs are delivered via a
sleazy Marla-Singer-like character living in 1970s New York - it's a deliberately exaggerated negative
stereotype of the thirty-something woman who never settles down. The album starts off fairly light-hearted
with lines like ‘I went to the park to watch the little children/ the
mothers saw my heels and they said I wasn’t welcome’. However, towards the
end of the album she begins to tackle the topic in a more serious manner – the
most poignant lines being those at the end of ‘My Baby Wants A Baby’: ‘No
one will scream that song I made/ Won’t throw no roses on my grave/ They’ll
just look at me and say/ ‘Where’s your baby?’’.
It's a brave and interesting look into the attitude that people have towards childfree women. Even if some of it is delivered through a character, it's Annie's most personal album to date. Combined with
the incredible 70s soundscape and inventive arrangement work, it makes for
quite a phenomenal record.
★★★★★
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