A snooty recent piece from a snooty outlet wasn’t doing much to hide their disdain for Annie Clark: the music on Daddy’s Home lacked something, all slickness and cynicism but underneath the stylish veneer, oddly cold and passionless, it said.
The album is a reference to the release of her father after ten years spent in prison for fraud, the article in turn as quick to dismiss her pleas for people to at least hear both sides of the story, or in basic terms just be happy about their happiness.
Does she feel she’s being cancelled, it mused, nudge-winking with vague allusions to inequalities in the American justice system which are hardly Clark’s to own.
Most art, you can counter argue, is an empty vessel because the artist is almost never there in person to contextualize it for the consumer. This truism applies just as much to songs, which cease to become the writer’s property in any meaningful way as soon as the first verse is open to the public.
As St. Vincent, Clark has continued her project-to-project metamorphosis, the dominatrix-friendly get up adopted for her last outing Masseduction as much a temporary disguise as any other.
Daddy’s Home is a more upfront record than its predecessor, but less direct. Gone is the arty synth-pop, replaced mostly with the 20th century’s soft rock, funk, soul tones and, on the opener Pay Your Way In Pain, her daffily post-modern take on the blues.
Staying true to the form, it doubles down on the slings and arrows of adversity, ‘So I, I went back home, I was feelin’ kinda queasy/But all the locks were changed, my baby wouldn’t see me’, interspersed with Prince-esque gasps and, climactically, a long screech of frustration.
Those who reckon the Texan takes insouciance too far will be pleased to know they’re also well rewarded; The Melting Of The Sun coalesces around a warmly underplayed Rhodes, the singer crooning about the experiences of women in whose shoes she might have walked in – Joni Mitchell, Tori Amos, Nina Simone – but then confesses with a sideways glance: ‘But me, I never cried/To tell the truth, I lied’.
Provocation? Only if the authenticity of the St. Vincent high concept actually bothers you. Truth seekers can also unpack both the album’s cover art and its finale, a brief and slightly ineffectual homage to Candy Darling, once of Andy Warhol’s set and, for the purposes of now anyway, a visual metaphor rich in subjectivity.
The title-track is more forthcoming, in-jokes about signing autographs in the prison visitor’s room (apparently true) giving way to lines of devotion (‘And we’re tight as a Bible with the pages stuck like glue’), a discussion of post-trauma in a safe space occupied by an unknowable universe of people.
No applied mystery however can hide that there are some irksome qualities here, the most grating the wholesale theft of the melody from Sheena Easton’s 9 To 5 for My Baby Wants A Baby, leaving the serious job of blotting the original out to the listener, while the three instrumental/hummed interludes add little.
Whilst forgiveness for that isn’t sought, it’s still almost impossible not to purr at the finer moments; the downscaled country of Somebody Like Me, life with the barriers temporarily crossed, while …At The Holiday Party is a revelation, its soulful brass and rootsy vocals an authentic peak amongst the hall of mirrors feel to the rest.
Annie Clark doesn’t believe in the 21st century’s stardom contract. Instead, she’s making vessels like Daddy’s Home for you to put yourself into.
How much is real there is nobody’s business but your own.
