St. Vincent Is The One-Woman Show The World Needs Right Now

It’s Sunday night, and it’s been a rough week. The news of the world has been more terrifying and depressing than ever before.

Closer to home, two tragic murders have shaken the country and put many people on edge. Going out doesn’t feel appropriate, let alone going to a pop show — and yet, when the lights go down, there is a beacon of hope that emerges from the darkness.

Her name is Annie Clark, better known by her stage-name of St. Vincent, tonight tasked with not only closing out Vivid festivities for 2018 but for raising spirits and giving a sliver of joy at a time where it’s needed more than ever.

Of course, Clark is up to the task. She’s a born entertainer, one of contemporary music’s great creatives and top working eccentrics. When one speaks of the weird and the wonderful, the music of St. Vincent is the centre of that Venn diagram.

With every St. Vincent tour, however, comes a blank slate — never one to engage with typical live fare, attendees instead are essentially trusting in the process that whatever takes place will be worth the price of admission. What follows is worth tenfold — a career-spanning, high-concept solo set that immerses you in Clark’s private universe for a brief, but entirely fruitful, period of time.

Titled ‘Fear the Future’, Clark neatly divides the performance in half. Part one draws from the first four St. Vincent LPs in chronological order — Clark emerges to the baroque flourishes of ‘Marry Me’, the title track to her 2007 debut. Both it and ‘Now, Now’ hold up considerably well, as do Actor‘s ‘The Strangers’ and ‘Actor Out of Work’ — although these songs are primarily alien to the audience, who perhaps will only be familiar with songs from the latter set.

Regardless, working through cuts from each album is demonstrative of Clark’s songwriting evolution and the agency she has managed to hold onto throughout her career. Though the set began with most of the stage covered, the front curtain pulls back incrementally over the course of the first set. As we edge closer to the present day, album by album, Clark allows us a clearer view of her private universe — a clever, well-executed piece of text painting. 

Clark’s performance is so direct and poised that anyone else being on-stage with her would feel like they were somehow interrupting. 

These selections also display the paradoxical multiplicities that are omnipresent across the St. Vincent canon. ‘Cruel’ and ‘Digital Witness’, for instance, are robust pop songs with swinging grooves that are easy to lock into. By the same token, they are bedfellows with ‘Cheerleader’ and ‘Strange Mercy’, which are among the more quietly-devastating pieces Clark has ever composed.

It comes to a head in a manic frenzy in the finale, as the drum machine speeds up and Clark herself yells into the ether: “I WANNA GO FASTER!” She ends up in the head-spinning ‘Birth in Reverse’, which may be the most danceable existential crisis you’re likely to encounter — a fitting conclusion to a retrospective that never once felt nostalgic or self-serving.

With the full stage revealed, we’re then lead to St. Vincent’s 2017 LP, MASSEDUCTION, performed in its entirety. It’s a bold choice — despite critical consensus on its merit, start-to-finish run-throughs are normally reserved for classic albums on milestone anniversary years. Once the reality of part two has set in, however, it gradually begins to make more and more sense.

One comes to appreciate the ebb and flow of the record as it unfurls, which may well have something to do with the conviction of Clark’s performance. She’s literally doing the whole set solo — no dancers, no band, only a backing track and a series of her signature guitars being swapped in and out.

Unconventional? Certainly — but when has St. Vincent ever been the opposite? In truth, Clark’s performance is so direct and poised that anyone else being on-stage with her would feel like they were somehow interrupting.

From the hypnotic shuffle of ‘Pills’ and the neon-tinged ‘Sugarboy’ to the expletive tenderness of ‘New York’ — which Clark introduces with a couple of knowing inner-west references to the Sly Fox and King Street — the live renditions of MASSEDUCTION ultimately eclipse that of their recorded versions.

The appreciation value for the album itself goes considerably up at the conclusion of ‘Smoking Section’. the closer for both the album and the show itself. Clark has given her all to forward-thinking and proudly-unusual music for over a decade now — and ‘Fear the Future’ as a performance is testament to that.

We leave a little lighter, a little easier, a little more gently than when we arrived. Even for just a moment, St. Vincent is world-changing.

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David James Young is a writer and podcaster. He also tweets at @DJYwrites.