Photo: Press/WENN
2014: A shock of peroxide white hair, a piercing gaze and a sharp and funk-fuelled fresh new sound - Annie Clark returns as alter-ego St Vincent, but moreso than you could ever know.
Upon the release of her last solo album, 2011's exquisite Strange Mercy, Clark was a critically-adored but still very much an indie cult heroin. Modest yet influential as her success had been, she left fans quaking at the sight of her frenetic live shows, as her playful vocals - proving herself a truly idiosyncratic performer, 100% committed to translating her music into real life.
Inspired by seeing footage of David Bowie's legendary performance on the Dick Cavett Show in 1974 during his Young Americans era, she died her hair a white shade of blonde while on the road with David Byrne. But unlike Bowie, Clark is not entering a new phase or a new character - but simply feeling more comfortable in her own skin than ever before. The figure you see before you is St Vincent in her purest form.
"I think all of my heroes played with their personal mythologies and their appearance," Annie tells Gigwise. "I'm having a lot of fun just mixing things up a bit and making my outsides look a little bit more like my insides."
The evolution of St Vincent since Strange Mercy is down to a number of things. Beyond the success of the record itself, Clark has since been honoured with the Smithsonian magazine American Ingenuity Awards in Performing Arts, and found a whole new fanbase after recording and touring the collaborative Love This Giant with Talking Heads' icon David Byrne.
"The music and even the shows have got more visceral and violent," admits Clark. "From that into the tour with David Byrne, everything was choreographed and a really light-hearted show. I got to stretch out as a performer in ways that I hadn't before. What I picked up most from David was that his creativity was effervescent to be around.All of that bled into the new show and the new record.
Clark adds: "Everything is very considered now - like a strange fever dream."
Her latest self-titled record is already a contender for album of the year. The Guardian gave it a perfect score and critics are clamouring for hyperbole over the LP's bold and funk-driven sense of drama and romance. However, as danceable as the album is, it's also pretty damn dark.
"The more that I make music, the less I question where it comes from - I just shepherd it to a good place," says Clark, asked about where the dark tones come from. "I'm always really interested in the grit of humanity, not just the romantic side. You know, like the way that people actually are and how we treat each other. There's a little bit of that reality, you just have to try to elevate the mundane when you perform a song."
The album's lead single, 'Digital Witness' is pretty much the perfect encapsulation of the record's microscopic view of humanity today - taking a sideways glance at how the internet and social networks are putting everything on show and creating a whole new world. It's a world where anyone can be anything, but can also fade into nothing.
"Whether we're conscious of it or not, most of everything we do is a performance," says Clark. "In the analogue world, it can just be about what the t-shirt you put on or how you styled your hair says about your identity - whether you acknowledge it or whether it's conscious or not. Now we have a whole platform in which to express the idea of selfhood and it's just sort of removed from who we actually are because we can create the idealised version of self."
She continues: "We can create who we wished we were, even when the reality is very different. In some ways, that's great because of the democratization of technology meaning that anybody can be a photographer, musician or a writer because everyone has access to a medium, but there's also a downside where actual musicians and photographers and writers can get lost in the noise. We're all just bowing to the God of content."
With that digital democracy, comes all new ways of discovering music. Through blogs and all modern fangled streaming sites and whatnot, music and hype can spread like wildfire. But with, as Clark puts it, so much 'noise to get lost in' - can we ever experience another 'Nirvana' moment where everything changes at once?
"I don't know if it's possible to have an exact Nirvana moment as there once was because there are so many more ways in which in we get music," she says. "Back then, there was the infrastructure and architecture to create that kind of key change, that shift from the Poison era felt very fresh and violent. I don't know if we have that that infrastructure to deliver that kind of key change any more."
So with herself, The National, Arcade Fire and the like currently invading the indie scene from the other side of the Atlantic, is there any kind of 'scene' on a grunge like scale at the moment?
"I don't know," she shrugs. "First of all, there's not always a movement. Sometimes there are just a few bands that come through and there's a thin red line that connects them so the press will get behind them and say 'oh it's a movement'. It's like, 'oh, actually these bands don't even know each other, but yeah OK - it's a movement'. So yeah, the idea is sometimes a little bit fabricated."
Fair enough - but can we at least hope for another collaboration with The National after her stunning contribution to Trouble Will Find Me's 'This Is The Last Time'?
"I'll be playing some shows with them in the summer - I love those guys," she smiles. "They became rock stars, which is so cool to see. I feel like the proud mom. They're a great band - they're hardworking and they've done everything the right way."
Beyond that, what does lay ahead for the ever-evolving St Vincent?
"I'll always be searching and trying to throw myself violently into the future, I don't know what that likes like right now. Who knows what lies ahead? That's what's so exciting about it."
St Vincent releases her self-titled fourth album on 24 February, 2014. She'll also be playing London's Shepherds Bush Empire on Thursday 20 February and Manchester Cathedreal on Friday 21 February.
For more information visit Gigwise gig tickets.
.jpg)
