St. Vincent – All Born Screaming (Total Pleasure, 2024)

Every time I hear of read about an artist such as Annie Clark – but it was the same with Beck Hansen during the 1990s – defined as ‘indefinable’, ‘elusive’ or one that doesn’t take into great account well refined identities, I usually think that, even outside of the box of postmodernism, this position is a great deal. In effect, having a persona that doesn’t correspond to your real self, or having your real self hidden, is something good for an artist. 

I still remember an old, odd interview with Tom Waits in which the journalist – you can find this interview in the book Tom Waits on Tom Waits: Interviews and Encounters, edited by Paul Maher, Jr. (Chicago Review Press, 2011) in the chapter dedicated to the album Foreign Affairs (Asylum, 1977) – was, in his own words, unable to separate the persona from the real person, and Waits had to pass all the interview telling “I am not a drunkard”, basically. Strange and alienating. 

So, when as an example Beck gave to the world the album Sea Change (Geffen, 2002) in which he was releasing custom love songs for the first time – even if some of these songs, like Paper Tiger, were heavily quoting Serge Gainsboug’s Histoire de Melody Nelson, and so once again far from a true ‘confession’ of personal feelings, that was enough to make his creativity loose part of its glaze, as anyone can listen from Guero (Interscope, 2005) on. 

Strange as it can seem, the curse of having your own butterfly wings pin-pierced, just to use an expression Fernanda Pivano utilized to describe what Bob Dylan tried to avoid in all of his career, is something true. After all, this is something each one of us has experienced at least once in the era of the social networks. If you give all yourself to the world indiscriminately, you feel emptied, sooner or later. 

I don’t know if people is obsessed by who the ‘real’ Annie Clark is – at least as far as I’m reading through reviews in my own country - because they’re bored or because they cultivate the secret desire to see another myth burning or falling; anyway, at least listening to her last effort All Born Screaming, the risk is avoided with great majesty and artistry. 

All Born Screaming is an album of sui generis ‘pop’ songs – Clark’s technique is more that of drying her sources of inspiration, in this case industrial music as she herself expressed to the world in an Instagram post where you can find all the musicians she took inspiration from, from Throbbing Gristle to Nine Inch Nails, giving life to an expression of her own. 

Obviously, you can find such diverse influences or better said assonances with the Byrds and David Bowie (Hell is Near), NIN (Broken Man), Bjork (Big Time Nothing), but at a first listening you’ll find yourself tied into a personal expression, artistically speaking. Ah, not the mention the fact that Clark, collaborator of such diverse artists as David Byrne and Taylor Swift, this time features at least Dave Grohl on drums in the track titled Flea. 

In the end, more than an album of industrial pop, All Born Screaming is a collection of songs whose common ground is the desire to experiment and see how far you can go from your own perspective not renouncing to the pleasure of landing in different territories. And for once, who cares about who the ‘real Annie Clark’, who the ‘real personality of the artist’ is … after all, who is able to define him or herself? And so, why do we have to give artists such a thankless task?