Annie Clark, better known as St Vincent, is jaw-dropping. There’s no sense in which this is an ordinary gig, which is unsurprising because St Vincent is not your ordinary performer. We are witness to an avant garde art/pop experiment, which is mercifully light on the wank factor.
For a start, St Vincent has an astonishing voice, which she weaves deftly around the music. It’s not exactly melodic, but it’s not unappealing on the ears either. Then, there’s her scorching guitar. St Vincent has some serious chops. She used the phrase “face-melting guitar” to describe her bassist’s playing, but it applies squarely to her. The crowd goes nuts over her guitar licks.
This brings us to her on stage antics. You only have to look at St Vincent to get the sense that there’s something slightly unreal going on. She’s all eyes and angles and wild white hair. She is supremely striking, but it’s the way she moves that cements the notion. Her eyes dart from side-to-side and roll back in her head as she manoeuvers herself about and gesticulates like a demented doll (a fembot shorting out). In fact, St Vincent actively encourages this perception. For instance, during one of her three spoken word pieces she says that, under the pretence of it being something she has in common with the audience, “You once spent a week concerned that your limbs were not your own limbs and that they were robot limbs.”
The choreography is deliberate and well-rehearsed; in fact, so much so that her bassist matches step with her from time to time. In terms of stage presence and sound, there’s a debt to the ‘80s – Kraftwerk, Prince and Bowie come to mind.
Mostly, the tracks come from her new eponymously named album, crowd pleasers being Rattlesnake and Bring Me Your Loves, although Cruel and Cheerleader, from her 2011 album, Strange Mercy, provided other highlights.
BY MEG CRAWFORD
Loved: The admonition pre-gig to “refrain from digitally capturing the experience”.
Hated: People forgetting that we were in a live music venue, not a museum.
Drank: Water (no queuing).
