(Caroline/Loma Vista)Channelling 70s
New York funk and her father’s release from
prison, the ever brilliant Annie Clark loosens up on her engagingly soulful sixth album
Annie “St Vincent” Clark may exaggerate the detail, tell oblique stories or get a little carried away in the dressing-up box, but her work is always packed with emotional veracity. One of Clark’s reputations – for hiding her truths behind elaborate personae – is a little undeserved.
Over the course of five albums, all increasingly assured, St Vincent has often laid her world perfectly bare. Young Lover, from her last high-concept, hot-pink tour de force, Masseduction (2017), found Clark’s then-significant other in a bathtub in
Paris, unconscious. The song felt like reportage; at the time, Clark was dating a supermodel. Her howl of pain was visceral. “Wake up young lover, I thought you were dying!”