St. Vincent - MassEducation (2018)

Annie Clark’s fifth album as St. Vincent isn’t a pop album so much as a deeply, admittedly personal communique with a pop veneer. The songs tear into the feeling of leaving and having been left alone.

St. Vincent gets called “the female Bowie.” Not always for her music, which has taken off from steady and skillful to expansive and gripping at exponential speed; not for her tributes and eulogies of the man, nor exactly for her gender-tweaking image. No, among the first hits for “female Bowie” is a British tabloid, sweeping her and model and ex-girlfriend Cara Delevingne into a world of “domestic bliss” and “purple loo outfit[s].” Such is the life of a woman whose artistry has been made into snackable content. But torn-from-the-headlines reductiveness aside, over the past decade there really hasn’t been a better candidate for the new anything-Bowie than Annie Clark.

Masseduction, then, is her Let’s Dance: exploding the comparatively unassuming craft of Marry Me and the comparatively tentative rhythms of her self-titled album into immediate hooks with a roaring largesse. The guitars are background squalls, compressed and oiled up with “Gary Glitter tuning.” Kendrick Lamar beatmaker Sounwave contributes. So does Jack Antonoff—who’s helped turn the stories of Lorde and Taylor Swift into technicolor memoirs—and even Delevingne herself on backing vox. All of which, in 2017, looks an awful lot like a pop album.

There’s a certain path that former cult artists, or at least non-megastars, take when inspiration or finances move their career pop-wards. The album will be meta, pop-about-pop: smart and layered at best, self-conscious or defensive at worst. The rollout will be a multi-platform extravaganza, where fake takes and alternate poppier personalities abound. Masseduction certainly has that. “We wanted pop-level intention,” said creative director Willo Peron, and Clark delivered: listening sessions styled as escape room puzzles, an art campaign in vinyl-bright pink and red, the fetish boots-and-catsuits in the style of (and on the lower half of) artist and album-cover model Carlotta Kohl; gimmicky Instagram interviews scripted by Carrie Brownstein. The interview questions were absurd placeholders standing in for the ubiquitous, rote questions musicians constantly field—the banal (“insert light banter”), the softballs (what would you tell aspiring musicians?) and the exhausting and gendered: what it’s like to play a show in heels? What it’s like being a woman in music? The punchline to this is pure undiluted acid. The acid’s seeped into the music, too; Masseduction isn’t a pop album so much as a deeply, admittedly personal communique with a pop veneer.