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“The Strangers” – St. Vincent
(Words/music: Annie Clark, available on Actor, 4AD 2009)  

One of Annie Clark’s gifts as a songwriter is the ability to make an arrangement quickly and skillfully change directions without sacrificing cohesion.  While abrupt changes work to jar the listener, Clark does this to further stories rather than derail them.  Instead, these songs shift their weight and refocus momentum in a different direction without losing steam.  “The Strangers,” the opening to last year’s Actor album, starts out fragile and graceful before focusing all its weight behind Clark’s distorted guitar riff.  It works well in part because Clark adds the riff on top of the looping flute and echoing voice, giving the song not only a harder edge but also intensifying the chaotic feeling.

The opening calm is deceptive by design, though.  Throughout the song, Clark repeats the phrase “make the black hole blacker” in an almost hypnotic trance or like a destructive mantra.   Whether this character feels detached by design or withdrawn against her will, the narrator seems focused on the deepening, intensifying void itself rather than all of the details and consequences of it.  In this sense, she’s waiting for the bottom to fall out right from the beginning of the song, anticipating the moment where the last shred of sanity gives way and plunges her into chaos.  Clark plays out this dark moment musically rather than lyrically and opens a few doors for her narrative – is it an imagined collapse or does the breakdown actually happen, for instance.  As an opening to her album (and one called Actor, nonetheless), she sets the stage for these contradictions to play out or, at least, to see if and when the bottom actually collapses.

More on St. Vincent: Allmusic | Amazon MP3 | Emusic | Last.fm