Annie Clark says, that is, St. Vincent says, that she knew that sooner or later she would publish an album titled like this: All Born Screaming. That she knew it since she was 23. But that she wanted to be prepared. That something primal, the cry of protest contained in the title – “the cry we give at birth can be taken as a type of protest, and the protest as a sign that you are alive,” he stated – is at the center of a majestic, superb album, full of textures and unexplored paths, of deep roots and a wise and tasteful experimentation, eager, delighted to self-explore. This is the seventh album by this multi-instrumentalist who, for many, reinvents even the idea of Annie Clark, in a Bowie-esque sense: the one from Dallas goes where Bowie said that anyone who intends to contribute something to the universe should go, that is , where you don’t touch foot but you know it’s your place.
Clark herself defines All Born Screaming —attentive to the homonymous cut and its status as a liberating introspective hymn— like a walk alone through the forest, but one in which the person taking it goes in search of himself, frontally, beautifully and brutally. What Clark has found here is “his own sonic vocabulary,” and hence the mutant nature of the assault, which above all delves into an unredeemed self. There’s ‘Reckless’ and its move from calm to ferocity—from chamber pop to a kind of precious noise rock—, or ‘Flea’, the cut she invokes —repeating that she could get rid of herself, rid of me— to the queen of the existential abyss: PJ Harvey. But also and above all the revolting and muscular ‘Broken Man’, a cut of, in Clark’s words, “threatening industrial rock”, which insists on that confrontation. “Who are you looking at? “Who the hell do you think I am?” she repeats.
His genius does not rest, so I would say that we are looking at one of the albums of the year, and who knows if of the decade.
‘Big Time Nothing’ explores a unique type—its own—of funky dance-pop of nineties inspiration and color, which pays homage to The Prodigy – she is the one who says it, and she also says that the spoken word of the cut is purely confessional, and that comes from his “constant internal monologue of depression and anxiety”—, while ‘Violent Times’ launches into the conquest of a very elegant, majestic electronica, in which his voice sounds more velvety and mysterious than ever: it almost seems like a classic Bond theme. The infinity of details, here and everywhere, add a baroque style so well understood that it does not even seem like it, but that places in every corner of each court what exactly it needs without us suspecting that it does so, and that not only elevates the album, but rather invents universes within his own universe.
What happens, for example, in ‘The Power’s Out’ with those guitars in dream that simply fade away, playing at the same time with the background and the form, in an album that, let us remember, is the first that Clark produces and that, if it sounds predominantly percussive it is because, when he finished recording the previous one, Daddy’s Home (2021), became obsessed with drum machines and modular synthesizers, and composed tons of what she herself has called esoteric post-industrial dance and that, in All Born Screaming represents, on its bright side, ‘Sweetest Fruit’, and perhaps also the eccentric and vaporous and deliciously funky and psychedelic ‘So Many Planets’. Yes, his genius, you will see, is overwhelming and does not rest, so I would say that we are facing one of the albums of the year, and who knows if of the decade.
St Vincent
All Born Screaming
Total Pleasure / Virgin
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