Spectreview: St. Vincent – Daddy’s Home

Released: May 14, 2021

Alternative
(Indie)
(Singer-Songwriter)

-DARK ORANGE-

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“So who am I tryna be?
A benzo beauty queen?”

Who is St. Vincent, really? That’s a question with a slew of different answers, because Annie Clark plays her nom de plume with a Bowie-like proclivity for obfuscation. She’s real, and then she’s not. She may joke about signing autographs in the visitation room of her father’s prison, but she refuses to go any farther than that. She may speak at length about the “grand misunderstanding” (and ideate about the ancestral line of legends she deserves to belong to) but Clark resides in that grey area between being actually famous and being indie-famous: well-known enough to stand in for Kurt Cobain in a highly-publicized Nirvana reunion, but not to be regarded in parallel as a “voice of a generation”.

Her alter ego, as a result, rests in another visitation room. She puts a lot of visible effort in to build up a mythos, but that effort rubs against the lower end of her echelon. And yet it’s the fact that she doesn’t commit fully, refusing to ditch her idiosyncrasies and her love of guitar-based music in the spirit of advantageousness, that keeps her from reaching stratospheric levels. If fame’s curse takes many forms, Clark’s is to reside in purgatory and be forever scrutinized as a superstar without the benefits of superstardom.

The difference is that, until Daddy’s Home, St. Vincent’s music looked ever-forward. From her debut on, her records felt rounded, shiny and sharp like a Bluetooth speaker in clamshell packaging. It wasn’t until the fashionable MASSEDUCTION when Clark wanted to be known as a songwriter over everything else, and Daddy’s Home makes that intention evident. With her and industry veteran Jack Antonoff at the helm, the album reaches back into the past for inspiration and returns with a sunlit warmth and a creepy 70’s sleaze. It is, for the first time in Clark’s body of work, a regressive moment, but ironically that’s exactly what makes it novel. 

Because of that warmth, Daddy’s Home might be the most accessible St. Vincent record yet. Barring the jumper-cable frizz of “Pay Your Way In Pain,” every song goes down  like a warm mocha on a weekend morning, with Clark’s masterful songwriting front and center. On the bongo-led “Down and Out Downtown,” Clark nails the feeling of the morning-after, when the hedonism of the previous night cuts against the dewy chill of the half-light. “Daddy’s Home” also captures the feel of its inspiration with its campy swing, although it’s a little too clean and restrained to transcend pastiche. “…At The Holiday Party” is Norah Jones coffee-shop vibes with the social frankness of Joni Mitchell;  “The Laughing Man” sprawls out in a gloriously depressive haze; “Somebody Like Me’s” beauteous arpeggiation circles like bluebirds on a mowed lawn. From a purely aesthetic perspective, these are uniformly gorgeous songs with hard-hitting time-tested melodies.

So time-tested, in fact, that several of its tracks end up rubbing uncomfortably close to their influences. Clark makes it known that “My Baby Takes My Baby” interpolates the Carpenters’ “9-to-5” (and does something kind of sluggish to it), but there’s still the chorus of “Down” and its eerie similarity to another Nirvana track, as well as the pastoral psychedelia of “Live in the Dream” and its cross between The Beatles’ “Sunking” and the somnambulant drama of Pink Floyd’s “Us and Them”. The latter leads lyrically into “The Melting of the Sun,” which name-drops so many icons in its measured take on Young Americans that you would think she’s intentionally taking the piss out of Lana Del Ray. Great poets steal and all that, but for its adventurous dive into the past, Daddy’s Home has the unfortunate effect of feeling so tied to its predecessors that its sense of uniqueness is diminished.

What it doesn’t lose, however, is its sense of place. We’ve learned by now that nostalgia is an escape hatch that’s easier to open every year the news gets harder to look at. Daddy’s Home is as escapist as Clark has ever gotten, and so despite the fact that much of it is still wrapped in her indomitable personality, she still gives us the option for us to see ourselves in its appropriative sleaze. The future can wait.

Recommended for Sunday brunch at The Green Bean.