I owe my friend Adam a lot for introducing me
to St. Vincent, through her
wonderful self-titled fourth record, when we exchanged our albums of the year lists
at the end of 2014: I think that record was second on his list that year, and
that inspired me to buy it. Although I’ve
still not yet gone backwards and investigated her releases from before that, St. Vincent was one of my most-played albums in 2015, and I was really excited
about MASSEDUCTION on release. It did exactly what I wanted, delivering more
ultra-high quality adventure-pop, but moving in new directions. MASSEDUCTION
is both confrontational and intimate. It’s a theatrical record, but one that also feels personal and affecting. Most importantly, it’s a huge amount of
fun. Musically, it mixes warm percussion
with stabbing guitar licks, strangely constructed synthesiser parts and
haunting piano. At times it is vast in
scope, like on the anthemic ‘Los Angeles’
or the frantic title track. But elsewhere
it is incredibly stripped down, such as on the soulful slide-guitar of ‘Happy Birthday,
Johnny’, or the absolutely wonderful ‘New York’ (which is my second favourite individual
track by anyone in 2017, pushing the Foo
Fighters’ super ‘The Sky Is A Neighbourhood’ to third). Lyrically, MASSEDUCTION consistently is intelligent, confident and
challenging. St. Vincent is a true pop artist,
of a vintage that seems to me to be comparatively rare now: she’s a successor to the likes
of Prince or (pre-downslide) Michael Jackson. More please.
sample track: New York