St. Vincent — MASSEDUCTION (2017) | Album Review
The art-rock queen goes pop, with fascinating results.
It would be a huge mistake to talk about music 2017 without mentioning personal stories that inspired the best albums of the year. Just to name a few, earlier this year we had Mount Eerie’s Phil Elverum coping with the death of his wife on A Crow Looked at Me, Lorde and Jay-Z dealing with their relationships on Melodrama and 4:44, and Paramore trying to move on after a tumultuous period on After Laughter. St. Vincent is no different. Her two previous records both have an archetype: Strange Mercy was Housewives on Pills. St. Vincent was Near-Future Cult Leader. Now, after having so much success “it literally made her sick” and months of just “go-go-go”, on MASSEDUCTION, she’s simply Annie Clark, reflecting on her life while trying to reconnect with lost relationships.
The first single off the album, “New York” shows us a taste of this, with Clark dealing with the two big loss of her life: her break-up after a two-year relationship with Cara Delevingne, and the death of her hero, David Bowie. The track caught us by surprise: gone are the cosmic guitar, the thumping beats, and the dramatic instrumentation. In their place is the simple piano bubbling underneath her laments about New York, which has become strange and unbearable now that most of the people around her are gone. Like many of the songs on MASSEDUCTION, “New York” is short and subtle, but definitely not lacking depth. Within 2:34, St. Vincent cycles through three rounds of verse-chorus, longing for the ex-lover she endearingly calls “motherfucker,” while resolving their relationship in peace, deciding to move to Hollywood, “where [her ex-lover is] the only motherfucker in the city […] who’d forgive [her].”
Almost contradictory to the first single, the second single, aptly titled “Los Ageless,” sees Clark at the peak of her energy, reminiscent of “Digital Witness.” The distorted guitar returns, backed up by electronic drums and scathing synth-bass. However, most notable is the trademark polysemous lyrics, especially in the chorus, where she uses anaphora and antanaclasis. The phrase “How can anybody have you” is repeated every line, but slightly altered each time:
How can anybody have you?
How can anybody have you and lose you?
How can anybody have you and lose you
And not lose their minds, too?
On their own, the lyrics can be interpreted as referring to a lost lover. Placed into the rest of the lyrics, however, they can be referring to youthfulness and beauty, or the glamour of Los Angeles. As if to round up a metaphor of the obsession with being young, the wild, explosive sound quickly burns out, giving place for a dramatic one-minute outro monologue, like ashes raining down after a volcanic eruption.
The sudden change in energy level makes a perfect segue into the emotional, musically sparing piano ballad “Happy Birthday, Johnny,” where the singer reaches out to a dear friend (who may or may not be figurative), previously appeared in the track “Prince Johnny.” In the song, Clark is now distant to the self-destructive friend, after multiple conflicts and her new-found fame. Again, the lyrics are polysemous: “Christmas,” “Jim Carroll,” “how-to-manual” is a playful Christmas-themed word-play: “Christmas”- “Carol” — “Emmanuel.” Connecting the lyrics in this song with those in “Prince Johnny,” we can also see the friendship explored here as a relationship with the singer herself, as the two friends Annie and Johnny are described as similar in nature in the St. Vincent song. Hence, the last lyrics “I hope you find peace,” may address both Johnny and St. Vincent herself, wishing her could deal with her problems and move on with her life.
A collaboration with Jack Antonoff as a producer, MASSEDUCTION is filled with layered and textured pop backing up personal lyrics, akin to Melodrama. On the opening track “Hang On Me,” the bright instruments occasionally shine through the foggy vocals, foreshadowing the jingling “Pills” that follows. Even though it is hard not to interpret “Pills” as a tongue-in-cheek jab at pharmaceutical companies with its playful, advert-like hook, it was written simply as a little snapshot of Clark’s life, engendered as she was popping a sleeping pill into her mouth. Meanwhile, the title track expresses the singer’s desire to be accepted: “I can’t turn off what turns me on.” Sonically, it juxtaposes the distorted guitar with lively synth beats, the robotic, soulless “masseduction” refrain with the central lyrics, hence presenting the singer as a deviation from the “mass produced” norm.
The least family-friendly song on the album, “Savior,” ironically features her aunt and uncle singing backup to the funky tune about kink and role-play. The song is also the most peculiar structure-wise in the album, with a refrain after the chorus, featuring a twelve-note melisma that makes up the whole one-minute outro. Unlike the rest of the song, which is delivered rather sentimentally detached, the monosyllable line “Please” is packed with emotions, growing more and more desperate as it is repeated, as if the whole role-play kink is just a means to escape from an even darker and despondent reality.
Still, after all those highs and lows and all those relationships, the album saves till the end the most important relationship of all: the relationship to oneself, as Clark faces her inner demons in the album’s best and most forlorn track, “Smoking Section.” With no chorus, the song goes through four verses filled with suicidal thoughts, insecurity, and conflicts, with Annie Clark singing so low, saving her breath like she’s afraid of what is coming out of her mouth. Then suddenly, the song makes a swerve when she starts pondering “what could be better than love?” She reminds herself “it’s not the end,” cooing over and over, before the song (and hence the whole album) comes to an end, after all the darkness and complexity, on something simple, bright, and instantly recognizable: a major chord on the piano. In the end, there’s always hope.
Rating: A
Essential tracks: “Smoking Section,” “Happy Birthday, Johnny,” “New York”
