St Vincent: Actor Review
Initially, it might be hard to decide whether Vincent has too much talent to waste on this kind of rock, or if she is going to burn out trying to be something she isn't. There was a lot less traditionalism present in her first album, and that can be a worrying trend. The more I listen, the more I appreciate this accessibility. It was a stroke of genius to be this unsettling in a traditionally comforting sonic landscape. It's bound to capture the attention of people not normally this adventurous. So to answer my previous question, it's what fans of Marry Me should want-- a wolf in sheep's clothing.
The list of improvements made from her first album is long. It's tempting to go through it point for point, but it's just easier to listen to both albums yourself and hear the differences immediately. Vincent has always wanted to be this kind of a rock act, but she had a rough go of it the first time around. Stuff didn't gel, noises were annoying, and lyrics were underwhelming. Wanting to have uncertainty in your music still requires specificity; you're still saying something, and being precise about ambiguity has made all the difference here.
There's a cleanliness to the approach Vincent has brought that....man it's just nice to hear focused music. That's different from sparse music, too, where you wish it sounded more full. Lesser acts have a tendency to either not know how to expand the sound, or worse, don't know when to quit. It's not that easy, though, to just hit the happy medium. You need to be good at recording, mixing, and most of all, playing well.
The subtlety of the double tracking on vocals, the attention to reverb, the forethought to include woodwinds. These are all the touches I'm very happy haven't been forgotten. I'm also quite a fan of the diversity of instrumentation; this isn't a guitar-forward offering, and even in art-rock that can be a rare sight. There's piano forward pieces, woodwind led sections, choral asides, faux-old chamber diddies, flute loops, and rhythmic thumps, to name a few. That's not to say guitars are absent--some of the most addicting songs are jammy and jolty numbers.
Vincent nails every note she has to sing, too. Many of the songs make the most of her ability to bend the pitch, creating melodies that seem to blow gently in the breeze. Paired with this music, her precise and delicate harmonies add to the arresting quality of the album. She's never as emotional as the music is, and yet she gets more out of Actor Out of Work than Modest Mouse ever does on their similar songs.
That is to say, just being weird is just being weird--but being more than that can still sound weird. Vincent isn't using novel sounds to generate attention, it's just that they correctly establish the mood. Moving from traditional rock sounds to orchestral soundscapes and back again is a trick that just keeps generating great little moments. Marrow is an easy example, as it has the most jarring shifts and some of the most dissonant sections. The best moment, however, might be the end of Black Rainbow where a gently pleasing and descending melody begins to climb the scales in a weirdly uncomfortably lengthy instrumental interlude. It's followed immediately by a similar upward scaling opening to Laughing With a Mouth of Blood, and this time it's a comforting guitar and violin combo to welcome in the familiar rock aesthetic.
I've heard people describe Vincent's style as dreamlike, gleefully evil, or straight wonderland. I gravitate towards dreamlike for this album, but not in a way that these descriptions anchor her to cartoonishness or dream-pop. The stories told here, coupled with both warmth and discomfort in the music, patch together incomplete stories from reality--not magic stallions and lakes of lava. Marrow feels borne of an especially difficult nursing school study session. Elsewhere, memories of being at the bottom of a pool or spending the night at a hotel flood the scene, formless and almost disconnected.
Fears, insecurities, and admonishment all get their chance at the microphone inside your subconscious. Even when the waking moments of the album come around, Vincent coyly alludes to knowing your deep, dark secrets as if she listened to you talk in your sleep. What would your father say? What would your mother do? Have we stayed awake too long, and will that cloud our judgement?
There's probably not as much of a running thread as I have headcannoned. Even if it wasn't intended to be conceptual, it's definitely thematic; I'm enticed to paint a mental world, and that's often as satisfying as one created for me. It makes sense, too, that the songs don't completely connect--it wouldn't present as good of a stream of consciousness if they did. There's something kind of cool about this second-guessing quality: am I digging too far into it, or is it actually that deep? I don't know, and I would rather not find out.
The end of the album focuses on lush walls of sound more and more as you go, and that's always going to pique my interest. This is right out of the Grizzly Bear playbook, and I am quite a sucker for this kind of presentation. Lushness does have a tendency to derail all the momentum built up without any of the earlier, punchier songs to break it up. If these sleepier songs at least had the intriguing melodies or timings of those earlier songs, they would be far more memorable. It's the comparison that really hurts, and I'm just as content to just write them off as comforting closers; how else would you welcome the dawn?
I love this album. I keep finding more reasons to appreciate what's presented. But even after all this talking, I don't feel like I've described it with any acceptable accuracy. All I can say is that this is the kind of music you need to experience for yourself to see just why it's such a difficult album to pin down. Hopefully you also see what I see: a voice that almost feels familiar, and yet is truly unique.
9/10
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