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St Vincent - Teenage Talk

A self-contradictory elegy for nostalgia, this might’ve drowned on ‘St Vincent’. Alone it’s the musical equivalent of a self-contained short story.

8th April 2015

If you’ve been watching HBO’s Girls, you’ll know that adolescent-minded twenty-something Hannah Horvath has finally shown signs of growing up: boundaries, nuance, empathy. Appropriately, soundtracking her transformative moment was St Vincent’s ‘Teenage Talk’, a demo that was apparently just ‘laying around’ a few months ago. On first listen it’s a bittersweet trip down memory lane: universal and at times pretty funny, too - “Oh, we laughed so hard, threw up in your mother’s azaleas.” Set to a soothing synth riff, these tales appear to be nostalgic memories of less complicated days, of drinking too much and knowing too little, “before we had made any terrible mistakes.”

But Annie Clark recognises that life can’t be like that. “How do you see me now?” she asks. These days she has a spectral albatross “smouldering” on her shoulder, but is the simplicity of the past really preferable, “just ‘cause it’s cased in glass”? ‘Teenage Talk’ embodies that conundrum: it’s a self-contradictory elegy for nostalgia. With its sparing melody and wistful subject matter, it’s understandable that it wasn’t included on Annie Clark’s latest tour de force, ‘St Vincent’, or its deluxe edition. Alongside the blaring horns of ‘Digital Witness’ or shredded guitar lines of ‘Regret’ it might have drowned: instead, it stands on its own two feet, the musical equivalent of a self-contained short story.

Tags: Reviews, Listen, St. Vincent