St. Vincent
Strange Mercy

Music is often a dimension! A dimension that is created around us when we listen to something that makes us stand still, our ears irradiated by every single note. And that is precisely what Annie Erin Clark (voice and guitar), who goes by the name St. Vincent, manages to achieve in her latest album "Strange Mercy," half self-produced along with John Congleton, who has worked with, among others, David Byrne, Xiu Xiu, and Micah P. Hinson.

There is an intense use of electronics without ever veering into fiction. The distortion of the guitar appears choked, like a parody of itself, and shows a certain peculiarity in touch. Song after song, we are projected into the dimension of the characters and the themes addressed. There's Chloe in her afternoon of nervous apathy who, having donned heels and a white shirt, has to return to work without a true need for kisses and with the awareness of having to heal her own wound. There are the children of "Cruel" (also noteworthy in the music video) who look at you with an expressionless Orwellian Big Brother-style eye. There's the cheerleader in her melancholic chant who no longer wants to be one after having seen America laid bare. There are wonderful verses like "It's a champagne year full of sober months." Track six "Strange Mercy" is the masterpiece of the album, a song of great intensity and indeed strange mercy towards a lost boy beaten by a policeman. There's Elijah who is the classic lover saying to wait for him as if he were a damn bus, and blinded by love, we remain waiting like codfish when instead we should flee at the speed of light. And furthermore, in "Year Of The Tiger," the last song, the protagonist wears Italian shoes! How cool are we!

Note the harshness of the themes addressed from a perspective that appears vocally catchy (sometimes less instrumentally) and often sweet and sensual, as happens, for example, in "Surgeon": "Best finest surgeon come cut me open." This is a prerogative of anti-folk, although I don't feel like placing this album within a genre, it would be like imprisoning an innocent... and furthermore for having stolen candies!