West side story
Annie Clark’s masterwork evokes the sights and sounds of 1970s New York City. By Tom Doyle.
St. Vincent ★★★★★ Daddy’s Home LOMA VISTA. CD/DL/LP
THE LAST WE saw of Annie Erin Clark AKA St. Vincent, on her Grammywinning fifth LP Masseduction, she was harnessing her frantic feelings in panicky and dirty synth-pop, strapped-in tight, white-knuckling through a turbulent ascent into mainstream fame. Four years on, that state of high anxiety has abated, replaced by a far calmer state of reflection and an act of time travel to the early ’70s.
The back story of Daddy’s Home is a real one. In 2010, Clark’s father was imprisoned for 12 years for his part in a $43-million stock market manipulation. The opening verse of the title track, rendered in woozy Broadway jazz, finds her signing autographs in the prison’s visitors’ room, waiting for “inmate 502”. The strange dichotomy between this part of her life and her Tiffany ad campaignlevel celebrity is made explicit, as is the toll on Clark herself: “Yeah, you did some time/Well, I did some time too.”
Clark’s relationship with her dad has a greater effect on the sound of Daddy’s Home, however, since it drove her back to his ’70s record collection. Significantly, it’s an album made at the Hendrixfounded Electric Lady Studios in Greenwich Village, where Clark and co-producer Jack Antonoff – brilliant here on rolling James Gadson-styled drum grooves and syncopating Wurlitzer electric piano – have tuned into the echoes in the walls, whether left there by Stevie Wonder or, in the fuzzy, funky Pay Your Way In Pain, Bowie and Lennon recording Fame.
As a depiction of New York past, with its Donny Hathaway vibes and wandering flute and electric sitar counterpoints, Down And Out Downtown is vivid and beautiful, introducing recurring lyrical motifs: flowers bought in a bodega, morning journeys in last night’s clothes, visions of the tops of skyscrapers. Two tracks meanwhile take a carefully-plotted trip to The Dark Side Of The Moon, the lovely drowsiness of Us And Them in the rising-from-a-blackout tale Live In The Dream and the even slower, druggier The Laughing Man, with its graphic admission, “Like the heroines of Cassavetes/I’m underneath the influence daily.” Touches such as these make Daddy’s
Home all the more cinematic: the individual in …At The Holiday Party whose Gucci purse is “a pharmacy”; invoking the Andy Warhol/Lou Reed muse in Candy Darling, the “queen of South Queens”. Elsewhere, My Baby Wants A Baby takes a surprising leftturn, borrowing Sheena Easton’s 1980 hit 9 To 5 and giving it the quiet desperation of late-period Abba, while adding sly humour and fears of potential parenthood.
It’s masterful stuff: a full conceptual realisation, filled with great melodies, deep grooves, colourful characterisations and sonic detail that reveals itself over repeated plays. It’s also a record made for vinyl, tailored to be heard as a label spins. But even if its heart is in the ’70s, Daddy’s Home is a keeper for the decades to come.