St. Vincent’s Barbaric Yawp for These Violent Times
‘All Born Screaming’ is an art pop iconoclast’s post-plague roar
In a year littered with think pieces parsing Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter and Taylor Swift’s Tortured Poets Department, stunningly little ink has been spilled in the name of the female-fronted pop album packing the year’s most palpable punch.
The comparative silence toward St. Vincent’s All Born Screaming is understandable — to a degree. 17 years of sonic derring-do and stage theatricality have made St. Vincent a cult favorite. Bey and Tay are global superstars of historic proportions. The credit ratings on their face cards are worlds beyond St. Vincent’s.
Like last year’s hipster sensation boygenius, St. Vincent is revered by the self-styled tastemakers who write and talk about music in the digital wild west. Yet, the chatter surrounding All Born Screaming barely registers as a whisper compared to the sonic boom that propelled the sophista-folk trio to three Grammys.
I suspect the lack of conversation around All Born Screaming is largely due to the fact that it’s a hard record to discuss. It’s resoundingly visceral; a haunted house of sensation to be experienced, not analyzed. In futile search of a single word that captures the album’s primevally post-modern energy force, my…
