That’s not right. I should say [rock voice] "Yeah, that’s right, we just jammed…" But, you know, I’ll be honest. There are some vocal takes in there that are first takes. But it really is just the sound of people playing. We get good drum takes. And good bass takes. And I play a bunch of guitar and sitar-guitar. And it’s the sound of a moment in time, certainly. And way more about looseness and groove and feel and vibe than anything else [I’ve done before].
She seems to be referencing real 20th Century artists and figures in the lyrics. Well, at least the Nina Simone one was clear.
I’ve not taken the new track off replay since i came across it earlier. Reminds me of when I replayed “Hang On Me” like a dozen times before I listened to the rest of Masseduction when it came out. She is one of the best writers and performers around today. Her melodies are incredible.
Second that! I really like this new single. It seems this record sounds more organic and less electronic than Masseduction. Somehow, it reminds me more of her first two records, but knowing St. Vincent, it’ll be something completely different.
Same issues with the second single as the first. I feel like she must be eliding some profound inspiration difficulty if she's reduced to doing namecheck songs in Chelsea Hotel drag.
It was nice to see Jason Falkner and Justin Meldal-Johnsen (frequent members of Beck Hansen’s band) playing in her band.
I am a bit torn by this. I know I will enjoy the new record because the sound palette is right up my street and I loved the MassEducation / Masseduction releases. Bowie may have marketed YA / StS by stressing its lack of authenticity but his love of Philly Soul and Neu! etc was completely authentic, reflecting and refracting something culturally that was happening around him in real time. Part of the reason those records work so beautifully is that he is swept up in a cultural moment, channels his fandom for all this thrilling new music via the fractures in his own mental health and then Bowie-fies all this into a whole new pop product. Late 1974 / early 1975 YA is made between tour dates and out in March. StS is made in October / November and out in January of 76. This was art made in the moment and injected into the culture while the tape machines were still cooling off. Astonishing when you think about. These St Vincent SNL performances are really good, especially compared with the competition that is currently out there in the Art Rock field, but for me there is also something far too knowing about it. Even the on stage interactions feel like people who have absorbed the source material and are re-enacting moments of cultural mix-up that happened spontaneously in 75 and 76. Back then it was wild, transgressive and forward looking. This is more like Cindy Sherman Does Bowie . She knows she is doing it, you know she knows that you know that she knows she is doing it. So how much is this one big wink to the audience the entire point of the exercise? I guess it depends on the how good the songs are. Kind of reminds me of that early Stone Roses photo that was set up to look exactly like a photo of the 60s Stones performing in the Brian era on a television studio floor. It's a great image but ultimately it is someone else's image and escaping from the gravity of that original moment in time is very difficult, relying, as it does, on suspension of disbelief and as few people as possible having an active memory of, or abiding interest in, the original. Of course great songs are the rocket fuel that allow you to escape your influences and if this is an album of songs that are that good then we are in for a treat.
Beautifully put, Bassist. Maybe it would help to think about the whole thing more like an actor performing in a play or a film. We see this all the time but don't hold it against Tilda Swinton, for example, for one year being in 'Orlando' and another year being in 'Doctor Strange'. Her performances (for me) are always interesting (even if the project may not be) and we don't generally consider actors as being fake for doing their job when they appear in period pieces, etc. Perhaps all that's needed is a slight shift in thought to enable you to more fully enjoy what St. Vincent is doing here - and, of course, that's not even her real name. The art of pretense is built into her product.
For me, it all comes down to this: she's clearly doing her own take on Bowie and all of her influences from the 70s and hamming it up big time, but I wasn't around to witness all of that when it actually happened, so it's exciting to watch one of my favorite artists bring it back to life in the modern day. Whether people enjoy it or think of it as inauthentic and pretenious is up to them, but I personally dig the sly-wink theatricality she is bringing to her performances right now
Thanks. This is exactly why I mention Cindy Sherman. Greg Crewdson might be another reference. Tilda Swinton's performances totally feed off of that kind of energy BUT the performances work because they are usually in the service of a script and a directorial vision of the highest quality. If the songs on this new record don't transcend what is a brilliantly constructed shout-back to the theatre of another artist's best work then why bother with making the record at all? Amalia Ulman didn't need to actually do the things she referenced in her Instagram work, she just had to make you believe she did them. If the record is just a souvenir or a memento of the real performance which is the promotion and packaging of that record then that would be disappointing. What I hope is that the music has more than enough about it to make all this irrelevant but that bar is set pretty high even in as null an era as this one. I'm totally onside with the ambition but fear it might be unscalable. Somebody who doesn't remember YA and StS being released and doesn't suspect they've already got way too many good-not-great albums in their collection and too little time left to enjoy them may feel differently!
Agree 100% with all of this. While St. Vincent is clearly massively talented, there’s something deeply sad about watching someone who is supposedly one of the great artists of our time cosplaying the 70s. There’s nowhere left for rock to go, so we’re reduced to putting Bowie, glam, and 70s soul in a blender in order to temporarily revisit the last moment when rock really mattered. Perhaps listeners too young to remember the 70s as they happened find this more new and interesting than I do, I wouldn’t doubt it. I actually pre-ordered the album, because I do like the two songs I’ve heard so far, and, like Jenny Lewis’s or Fleet Foxes’s recent homages to the past, something like this is the best we can expect in 2021.
I've pre-ordered the St Vincent album and I loved that Jenny Lewis record too. I didn't need another album that sounded like that but the songs made it essential. Ditto the back to back Shelby Lynne albums from the last year or so, the Jessie Ware tribute to Paradise Garage and the last two from Lana Del Rey. All these transcend their influences to glorious effect because the songs are largely wonderful. What you can't recreate is the commercial jeopardy Bowie risked with Young Americans, StS and later with Low. He had no idea how that music would be received by an audience raised on Ziggy / Ronno and once he had taken the fans down one unfamiliar path he out manoeuvred them again just months later. Seemingly an endless capacity for self recreation which kept striking pop gold. Bowie was repurposing motorik Krautrock and Philly Soul just as those genres were producing their best work and recycling all that thrilling new noise back into pop culture almost instantly as a whole new thing. That energy cannot be reproduced in 2021. Everything is too stuck and undynamic. Even artists wanting to give off a sense of a new found artistic authenticity tend to end up reaching for someone else's idea of what authentic meant to a completely different generation of listeners.
