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Feb 24, 2014Annie Clark stands astride St. Vincent, a colossus in total--and thrilling--command.
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Feb 24, 2014St. Vincent showcases Annie Clark as a fiercely accomplished musician, a relentlessly original artist, and now, an innovator of pop.
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Feb 24, 2014Annie Clark’s fourth album is frequently extraordinary.
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Feb 18, 2014It’s an album that manages to remain accessible while still sounding challenging and unconventional, an album that can sound heart-stoppingly beautiful one minute and scratchily acerbic the next and, ultimately, an album that’s impossible to grow bored of.
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Feb 13, 2014St Vincent's 40 minutes offer an embarrassment of fantastic songs.
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Entertainment WeeklyFeb 26, 2014Crackling, uncanny and compulsively listenable. [28 Feb 2014, p.71]
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Feb 25, 2014All told, St. Vincent is a bold, ambitious, and perfectly overstuffed album.
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Feb 24, 2014Her biggest fans may prefer less direct writing, but it makes St. Vincent her most widely appealing album to date, an infectious work that doesn’t ever feel like a compromise.
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Mar 14, 2014This is Clark's most daring, uncompromising, infectious, and adventurous release yet, as St. Vicent features a musician challenging the very idea of what it means to be an artist in 2014.
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Feb 25, 2014St. Vincent, instead, entertains and provokes at every turn and is disarmingly self-assured.
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Feb 25, 2014Her guitar may be her primary tool for shaking up and complicating otherwise strictly defined songwriting, but Clark's voice remains the thing that defines her material, the glittering lynchpin of the glorious, ever-expanding world she's created.
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Feb 25, 2014That’s the wonder of St. Vincent. It’s a personal album that’s well-written enough to provide something we can all identify with.
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Feb 25, 2014Clark’s songwriting has a peculiar gap to it, and St. Vincent’s best moments are the ones that happen between sense and nonsense, between the long story and the primal reaction to it.
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Feb 24, 2014With her experiences and experimentation, she has combined and refined her sound to make it something that is similar and yet totally separate from anything she’s done before. St. Vincent isn’t afraid of being different or taking risks, and thinks we shouldn’t be either.
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Feb 24, 2014St. Vincent is a challenging art pop album that convincingly balances the beautiful with the ugly, and ultimately stays human despite its futuristic leanings.
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Feb 21, 2014Clark has made the beautiful ugly, the ugly beautiful and the difference between them nearly indistinguishable. If that sounds pretty complex and incredible, you've got a pretty good idea what listening to St. Vincent is like.
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Feb 18, 2014Those who never warmed to the sharp-elbowed vibe won’t find themselves wooed by a new angle, but for everyone else St. Vincent is close to definitive.
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Feb 14, 2014The Oklahoma songwriter is back with some of her most ebullient, ambitiously styled music to date on St Vincent.
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Feb 12, 2014It's an album that, despite its placement more as high art, isn't afraid to embrace pop music for everything it's worth, managing to be accessible while also challenging, drawing the listener in with familiarity to then unleash upon them this cryptic, paradoxical world that just begs to be explored over and over again.
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Mar 12, 2014Clark's exacting sensibility makes every song a new experience, finally birthing an album where every shot hits its mark.
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Feb 24, 2014St. Vincent continues Clark's run as one of the past decade's most distinct and innovative guitarists, though she's never one to showboat.
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Feb 21, 2014On a whole, St. Vincent might not be quite as distinctive or as audacious as Strange Mercy. Clark, however, has found a consistency which is rare among artists, stemming from the confidence she has in her voice and vision. It's enough to make song after song worth savoring. [Feb/Mar 2014, p.76]
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Feb 25, 2014St. Vincent is buoyant in the way that the Hindenburg was—it floats along steadily and excitedly, but with a decisive coldness that suggests that something unexpected might happen.
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Feb 27, 2014These songs are the strongest she’s written to date, with terrific hooks and melodies throughout.
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Feb 25, 2014This one is lithe and liquid, shy of a masterwork but still a fucking great record, top to bottom.
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Feb 25, 2014St. Vincent is her tightest, tensest, best set of songs to date, with wry, twisty beats pushing her lovably ornery melodies toward grueling revelations.
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Feb 25, 2014St. Vincent's real genius is the way it manages to project an aura of perfection while simultaneously showing us its guts; it suggests that while the polished surface may not be a lie, exactly, it's based on a series of elisions that we're all uncomfortably complicit in.
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Feb 24, 2014With the producer John Congleton, Ms. Clark creates an unpretty backdrop for some of her most alluring melodies.
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Feb 24, 2014St. Vincent is an overwhelming listen the first, second, maybe even third time around.
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Feb 24, 2014Clark’s readiness to be freakish and alone has translated into her songwriting, which is bolder than ever, and out to connect.
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Feb 24, 2014As her most satisfying, artful, and accessible album yet, St. Vincent earns its title.
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Feb 21, 2014Throughout there’s a determination to find the appeal in paradox, notably the beguiling blend of cool and cumbersome that carries the love song “Prince Johnny” to another place.
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Feb 18, 2014The songs from St. Vincent that you’ll return to umpteen times are front-loaded into its first 23 minutes.
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Q MagazineFeb 14, 2014This fourth solo album is daring and hugely composed. [Mar 2014, p.115]
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MojoFeb 12, 2014Clark has whittled a motley crew of characters who sit inside taut, ever so slightly paranoid, Byrne-influenced P-funk.... Wonderful. [Mar 2014, p.88]
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UncutFeb 12, 2014Darkly entertaining, thoughtful and a little threatening, St. Vincent fizzes with enthusiasm and the uncontrollable strangeness of life. [Mar 2014, p.74]
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Feb 12, 2014The devil’s in the detail, and it makes for a brilliant record.
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Mar 10, 2014St. Vincent dances with themes (family, success and the absence thereof, the isolation of the digital) but only ever seems to fringe against them in a way that doesn’t let the record add up to more than the sum of its parts.
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Feb 25, 2014St. Vincent proves on her new work that self-conscious and odd grooves can move you, too. Many songs find joy and invention in goose-stepping rhythms and hard, or even dissonant, shards of guitar.
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Feb 24, 2014Equal parts funky electro throwback and prog chanson monster, St Vincent's fourth album feels like the culmination of a trajectory from the margins to centre stage with a minimum of intellectual loss.
Awards & Rankings
User score distribution:
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Positive: 415 out of 459
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Mixed: 22 out of 459
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Negative: 22 out of 459
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Feb 25, 2014
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Mar 1, 2014
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Feb 25, 2014