Daddy’s Home by St Vincent is a superb tribute to the dirty, sly heart of New York
Annie Clark is no saint. The 38-year-old American art-pop multi-instrumentalist took her stage name not in honour of a canonised paragon but in reference to the death of the dissolute Irish poet Brendan Behan in St Vincent’s Hospital in Dublin in 1964. Her sixth album, Daddy’s Home, conjures up a sleazy New York funk-rock street odyssey, sprawling with the kind of disreputable characters to whom Behan himself, a lover of New York, would have gladly raised a glass.
The scene-setting openers, Pay Your Way in Pain and Down and Out Downtown, practically stagger around in smeared make-up and last night’s party dress, set to frazzled grooves that suggest Sly & the Family Stone nursing a hangover. There’s a woozy tribute to a transgender icon on Candy Darling – the Andy Warhol superstar who was celebrated on Lou Reed’s Walk On The Wild Side – and a sympathetic pen-portrait of a failing Broadway dreamer on the twisted ballad At the Holiday Party.
A possibly suicidal narrator makes a nuisance 911 call on The Laughing Man – “What’s your emergency?” asks the operator; “I’m in love,” drawls Clark – in a dreamy soft-rock setting that sounds like 10CC on sleeping pills. As in most St Vincent albums, the dark wit is wrapped around something viscerally emotional, and the pay-off sums up a bittersweet lyrical philosophy: “If life’s a joke, then I’m dying laughing.”
The title track, by contrast, finds Clark in prison, perkily signing “autographs in the visitation room” as she awaits the release of “inmate 502”. Her real-life father was jailed for 10 years in 2010 for his role in a $43 million stock-manipulation scheme. Stacked up with fruity showboating harmonies from a trio of female backing singers (including Kenya Hathaway, daughter of soul legend Donny), her “welcome home” song sounds about as remorseful as Kid Creole and the Coconuts doing the Jailhouse Rock. On this evidence, we don’t get enough white-collar crime in pop music.
Throughout Daddy’s Home, 1970s musical references abound, with Clark apparently concocting the album in tribute to her father’s record collection, which first introduced her to Steely Dan, David Bowie, Pink Floyd and Stevie Wonder. Alongside co-producer Jack Antonoff – who’s much in demand with female artists straddling the art/pop divide, having worked with Lorde, Lana Del Rey and Taylor Swift – Clark nails the kind of sumptuously blurred but raw studio sound you hear on mid-1970s Lennon and Harrison records. She builds detailed, multi-layered arrangements on which she plays sitar, lap steel, mellotron, Wurlitzer and synth, as well as her signature geometric electric guitar, breaking out a solo on Live in the Dream that could bring any prog rocker to their knees.
Meanwhile, the sublime Melting of the Sun honours such female musical pioneers as Nina Simone, Joni Mitchell and Tori Amos – women who gave Clark the confidence to follow her own iconoclastic path. Daddy’s Home is further proof that St Vincent deserves to be considered in their stellar ranks.
Out on Loma Vista now