I was late to the St. Vincent party. Like, really late. Annie Clark has released five albums as St. Vincent — six if you count her 2012 collaboration with David Byrne — and has spent 10 years in the spotlight. I just showed up about three weeks ago. I have no idea how this happened. As a dude who has built his career on knowing about cool stuff first, on spotting the young and talented and following them until they are old and dominant, missing the boat on St. Vincent feels shameful, like maybe I should hand over my License to Criticize. But, hey, we all make mistakes. It’s not like I didn’t know she was an incredible guitarist, great songwriter and generally good person — she’s a critical darling, and most of my friends are critics, professional or otherwise. The thing is, sometimes the art you need just has to arrive on its own schedule. St. Vincent’s Masseduction arrived right on time.
A little background: It’s been a weird year with a lot of emotional whiplash, personally, professionally and, of course, politically. My wife got pregnant, but we lost the baby. We were in a terrifying car accident five days later, but walked away unscathed. My first book was published in February, but the release events got mangled by a blizzard, a nor’easter and a heckler. (Not to mention sudden precipitous staff changes at the publishing house.) We lost a good friend, Nashville musician and artist Jessi Zazu, to cancer. That became national news, a phenomenon that felt both comforting and appalling. Someone had turned up the surreal knob on 2017, and I couldn’t dial it back.
A crisis of conscience induced by my complicity in the celebrity-industrial complex — a months-long panic attack about feeding the click economy and the monster that made Trump president — led to abandoning my work-at-home desk-jockey gig for 21-day workweeks lifting heavy shit for eight hours a day and a level of contentment I hadn’t known in ages. Free from the responsibility of making sure the click-grinder was full of sausage, I stopped listening to music that wasn’t Kesha. It was the longest stretch of silence my stereo had seen since my mom took away my CD player sophomore year of high school. Weird times, for sure.
Somehow, “New York,” the first single from St. Vincent’s new album Masseduction, made it through all of the mental barriers I had put between myself and music. I’m not sure how or when it came to my attention — I vaguely remember saying “this is quality art pop” and pressing play — but I can tell you why “New York” made it through. It’s a tiny, almost subliminal moment: A brief, bent bass tone slips into the mix and then drops out as she sings, “You’re the only motherfucker / In the city / Who can handle me.” Something about that note — waving as it signals the song’s transition from a piano ballad into a sophisticated, dance-y track — flipped a switch, rewiring a circuit in my skull that I thought was burnt out for good. The thrill of discovery, the high that comes with realizing this is my shit, the rush that I thought I had lost in the crushing cascade of publicity emails and celebrity-feud hot takes, was back. This was followed by the vastly underrated rush of buying the album in a record store on release day.
Masseduction had lured me back into the fold. As Clark says in the title track, “I can’t turn off what turns me on.” Typically, the things that turn me on — including god-level guitar solos, arty electronic squiggles and big infectious hooks — don’t come in one convenient package. But as I made my way through Masseduction — through the chemical bliss of “Pills,” the heartbreaking heroin fable “Happy Birthday, Johnny” and the neon-lit motorik of “Los Ageless” — I recognized a shared sense of isolation, an emotional distance that comes as a result of total engagement for what may be too long. Love is a prerequisite for letdowns, and nothing is as complicated as the simple things in life. The catharsis at the heart of Masseduction is measured, tinged with guilt and tempered with a weariness that comes with adulthood.
2017 has been a complicated year, and Masseduction is an appropriately complicated record. Whether it’s the searing sludge that underscores the astral electronics on “Fear the Future” or the spectral impatience of “Dancing With a Ghost,” St. Vincent crafts stories and sounds that run deep and get murky. Masseduction is not an album of simple, sugary joy. It is an album of and for its time, a work of art that reflects this moment of cultural shift and social evolution. Masseduction finds the weirdness in the American middle ground and solitude in our universal experiences, and rewires the emotional context to create an album of strange subliminal thrills. I’m glad I finally showed up for the party.
Email music@nashvillescene.com
