24 Oct 2017

Masseduction by St Vincent

From The Sampler, 7:30 pm on 24 October 2017
St. Vincent

St. Vincent Photo: supplied

Nick Bollinger takes a listen to St. Vincent's Masseduction and wonders who is the seducer and who is being seduced?

There’s music that can make you feel uneasy, even as it seduces you. Annie Clark – better known as St. Vincent - knows all about that.

It’s hard to tell whether she’s being fatalistic or offering a lifeline as she stares down the void with her invitation to ‘hang on me’. It’s the opening track on her new album, and sets the tone for a conceptually and musically complex series of songs, full of that kind of ambiguity. The concept is embodied in the title Masseduction, and it comes up again and again in these songs: the idea that, as a culture, we might have been lured en mass into fantasies that aren’t necessarily good for us; they may not even be our own.

Masseduction

Masseduction Photo: supplied

‘I can’t turn off what turns me on’ goes the chorus of the title track, which sums up the puzzle that lies at the heart of this album. Or as Clark put it rhetorically in a mock video press conference last month, ‘am I being seduced or am I the seducer?’ Though the way she uses the image here is sexual, mass seduction is an idea that could equally be applied to politics in the age of Trump, and there are moments scattered through the album where I assume that’s her intention. Meanwhile, she carries out her own kind of mass seduction with some of the most irresistible beats she has ever brought us. ‘Pills’ features a programme by Kendrick Lamar’s producer and collaborator Sounwave, a perfect bed for a typically equivocal lyric about the supposed benefits of medication.

If there’s been a Prince-sized hole in popular music this past year, then Clark might be trying her best here to fill it in with Masseduction. There’s the sexually explicit nature of the songs, and the confrontational cover image. But most of all, there’s the multi-layered, technicolour production which recalls the busiest parts of 1999 and Lovesexy.

Clark co-produced the album with producer of the moment Jack Antonoff, direct from his work on Lorde’s Melodrama. But although it employs some of the same maximalist sonics, they are very different beasts. If Melodrama is a night in the life of a heartache, Masseduction is more like a tour of modern-day Gomorrah, from New York to the city Clark deliberately and with deep irony misnames ‘Los Ageless’.

There are ballads too, amongst the skronk and electro-pop. And with little more than her piano and Greg Leisz’s floating steel guitar, the tension is laid about as bare as possible in ‘Happy Birthday Johnny’, the latest of several songs Clark has addressed to a recurring character she simply calls Johnny. But for most of Masseduction’s 42 minutes, the relationships are not as clearly drawn as that. There’s lust and fear in seemingly equal measures, and it’s left to us as listeners to decide who is the seducer and who is being seduced.

Masseduction is available on Loma Vista.