All Born Screaming
by St. Vincent
Tré’s Score: 8.8
Critics just love to talk about St. Vincent’s reinventions. From my listening chair, St. Vincent never really reinvents herself. She simply shows us another of the many faces of Rock music. Hailed as one of the greatest guitarists of all time, she has unique authority to do so.
St. Vincent, ever the spotlit idol, has always provided an offroad vehicle for Annie Clark, the otherwise normal, nerdy, silly Berklee dropout. St. Vincent IS the ultimate mistress of surprise – she literally teaches a masterclass on tension and release, complete with a section called “Every song needs an epiphany”. But focusing too narrowly on her desire to “reinvent” herself doesn’t do justice to her prowess. In fact, as far as I can tell, the word “reinvent” is often uttered by interviewers, but never used in Annie’s answers. And that’s because she doesn’t have to reinvent: every album builds a new on-brand world with Tolkien-level mastery. And finally, 7 albums in, we get to see her obsessive craft shine untarnished, as she takes the lead producer credit herself for the first time.
Say what you will about Taylor Swift, but we are in an era of eras. Explorer-type artists who have been around for more than a few albums are ready to paint with a broad palette now. Everyone from Four Tet to Kacey Musgraves seems to be calling back lyrically, texturally, and compositionally to their whole repertoire. Sometimes it’s buried (Beyhive, have you ever noticed that 3:15 on “16 CARRIAGES” and 4:01 on ”All Night” both interpolate the closing notes of ”Pretty Hurts”?!). Sometimes it’s blatant, like when Kacey writes about a “Golden hour faded black” in “what doesn’t kill me”.
And St. Vincent’s got quite the armory to work with; she’s been building up both her sonic and thematic palettes for over 20 years now. All Born Screaming is so obviously the perfect next step for St. Vincent’s canon. I’m not going to spend much time bolstering this claim on a lyrical and thematic level, because it’s hard to miss. “Violent Times” unravels a romance-amidst-end-times thread first pulled at in “The Apocalypse Song”. In “The Power’s Out”, a musical sibling to “Prince Johnny”, she adds to her compendium of powerful NYC imagery by starting us out at a subway station on Monday morning. Remember, long before she last strawed us on Eighth Avenue, long before she had drinks on Condé Nast as the Optimist of 30th Street, she named herself after a storied New York psychiatric hospital.
It’s the compositional details where her callbacks are the most impressive, because they are literally subtextual and, to many, subconscious. For every tribute All Born Screaming pays to the Rock Music Establishment, it also shows off something uniquely St. Vincent. In opener “Hell is Near”, while the guitar picking and effects pedal rack hearken to Kid A, her vocal note-bending is congruous with “Chloe in the Afternoon”. While “Reckless” is a stark, dissonant landscape modeled after the works of oft-compared Nine-Inch-Nails (thanks Pitchfork, we know), its bait-and-switch structure echoes deep Strange Mercy cut “Hysterical Strength”.
Single and standout track “Broken Man” is a new standard for St. Vincent’s production skills. She toys with the impressive trend of dynamic range manipulation first ushered into mainstream spotlight by the beat drop in “Dance Yrself Clean”, and tastefully employed by Mitski’s recent surprise choir on “Bug LIke an Angel”. But here, St. Vincent hammers us with a rockstars-only overdriven guitar strum immediately after asking “What are you lookin at?” It’s flirty and hot: she knows what we’re looking at, because she made us look.
“Flea” cements her mastery of a Hendricks-era retro sound she nodded to (maybe too aggressively) on Daddy’s Home. “Big Time Nothing” kicks off with a fat-as-funk Minimoog Voyager patch in the vein of “Los Ageless” and “Surgeon”, followed by some brand new effortless, danceable, nearly rapped spoken delivery. And while the vocal melody and delivery in “Violent Times” nod almost verbatim to “Sunburn”-era Muse, the horns repeat a familiar trademark Sforzando-Crescendo defined back on the David Byrne album (which y’all hated and I loved). “So Many Planets” arranges a backing choir that also calls back to Love This Giant.
St. Vincent saves the best for last with epic closer “All Born Screaming”, both a musical and lyrical climax. After 3 minutes of a nearly jam-band level of fun, Annie shows off her skill for surprise. Following an epic false stop around the halfway mark, Annie chants alongside fellow string-shredder/chanteuse Cate Le Bon. The pair repeat hypnotic mantra “all born screaming” enough times to bring us into a trance, while meticulously building a timeless wall of sound all around us. There are stringy synth pads, wet-as-hell slapback delays, drums of both machined and kitted variety (including a double-time riff and even a four-on-the-floor kick!), and layers of guitar solos. It’s everything that fans and musicians love about our generation’s David Bowie, wrapped up neatly in a 7-minute package. “All Born Screaming” neatly sums up just how perfectly full-circle the whole album feels: in it, Clark burns a picture into our minds as potent as a birth in reverse, but facing forward. In All Born Screaming, St. Vincent once again raises the bar for the album as a world to get lost in.
PS — While it didn’t fit nicely within the review, now’s a better time than any to give an on-record footnote defending Annie’s SOPHIE lyrics in “Sweetest Fruit”.
My SOPHIE climbed the roof
To get a better view of the moon
Moon
My God, then one wrong step
Took her down to the depths
But for a minute, what a view
What a view
Many on the internet seem to be taking issue with Annie Clark’s use of “My SOPHIE”, despite never having met her. However, this is St. Vincent's own established language (see “My Marilyn shot her heroin”). Annie is a romantic mourner. She often memorializes people she considers heroes, both dead and alive (like Bowie, Joni, Nirvana). It’s just an age-old rock 'n' roll move.
Criticizing Annie for penning the opening lines of “Sweetest Fruit” about the undeniably poetic circumstances of SOPHIE’s death is also shortsighted. The rest of the song ponders the essence of SOPHIE as both a dreamer and a human being. No one knew better than SOPHIE that “the sweetest fruit is on the limb”; the song implies that SOPHIE didn’t just die reaching out for the greatest beauty in life—her whole career was about traveling to places deemed unsafe and revealing the hidden beauty there.
It’s sadly typical of Generation ADD (of which I am a proud member) to cling onto a snippet and cause an uproar, without actually caring about the context. Annie is a queer hero and a pioneer, and my SOPHIE would wield her infectious smile at this tribute.
– III
