St Vincent - Bad Believer review • DIY Magazine

Forget all those zodiac animals - 2014 was the year of St Vincent. Kicking off by casually releasing DIY’s album of the year, Annie Clark’s cannonball of insanely complex but immediately porous alternative pop just didn’t lose momentum. Pink steps, robotic guitar solos, flat-cap pilfering, live renditions of ‘Prince Johnny’ with added blues-licks, and dystopian music videos all added to the growing inkling that Annie Clark is becoming a creative visionary of her generation. In other words, nobody would’ve blamed her for taking some time out to play another game of tag with some Texan rattlesnakes.

Annie Clark compared non-creative downtime to “being let down at the end of a tornado,” when she spoke to DIY early last year, and so maybe it’s thoroughly expected that she’s done the opposite. More recently St Vincent’s been going in hard on strange, religious tales of old, twisting them to her own increasingly driven, electronic ends. “Baptized in the shallow end of a Holiday Inn,” goes ‘ Pieta,’ one half of her Record Store Day split single ‘Pieta/Sparrow’, released in November last year.

‘Bad Believer,’ another new St Vincent track that ‘dropped’ today, is set to appear on the new extended version of ‘St Vincent’, and it takes the ideas behind ‘Pieta/Sparrow’ to ever-propulsive extremes. “From the nave and down into the altar/ I left my mama sitting in the pew/ and up before the trembling pastor/ faded as he touched my trembling hand,” Clark sings over squelching synths and frog-poppy little drum machines, narrating her own religious rapture. Thing is, she doesn’t seem that invested in the whole thing; she’s a ‘Bad Believer,’ after all. Annie Clark’s a self-confessed sinner, and word is that the devil’s a big fan.