(Total Pleasure)
Are we finally seeing the real Annie Clarke? Replacing alter egos with raw immediacy, she delivers one of her best albums: restlessly inventive and packed with ideas
The cover of St Vincent’s previous album, Daddy’s Home, featured Annie Clarke in character: heavy eye-make up, ripped stockings, blond wig – the “benzo beauty queen” who haunted a number of songs.
Well, of course it did. Clarke once released an album called Actor, and role-playing is very much her thing: the prosthetics-heavy “grotesque beast” on the sleeve of her David Byrne collaboration, Love This Giant; a “cult leader” for her eponymous 2014 album; the vertiginously heeled “dominatrix in a mental asylum” of 2017’s Masseduction. But curiously, Daddy’s Home also contained a song that appeared to question the wisdom of adopting personae at all. “So, who am I trying to be?” wondered The Melting of the Sun, before lauding a succession of confessional singer-songwriters: “Saint Joni” who wasn’t a “phony”, “brave” Tori Amos, “proud” Nina Simone. “But me, I never cried,” it added, “to tell the truth, I lied.”
