Last week, off-center electropop guitar-wielding goddess St. Vincent came through Memphis and divvied out love wrapped in music to hungry ears at Minglewood Hall. The songstress brought with her alt-rock outfit Shearwater to fill out the bill. With both acts working off of releases launched in the past year, the evening was full of fresh sounds and energy.
Shearwater is an indie pop band whose tree trunk contains more than a couple of rings. Having been around for a dozen years or so, they’ve been able to craft their sound carefully into a yin-yang of straightforward songwriting and understated odd decorations that teeter on dissonant at their most impacting moments. Jonathan Meiburg’s composition sticks to the verse-chorus-verse-chorus format rather tightly.
This sense of tradition carries a riding vibe of the familiar to anyone who has heard a guitar pop song in the last 20 years or so—with a catch. Very much like Radiohead in the mid ’90s the meat isn’t in the catchy-ness of the choruses alone; it’s a complex dish that comes from the familiarity of the chord progression in tandem with the outlandish feedback flares or sampler supporting parts from Lucas Oswald.
Songs tend to initially hit soft with repetitive melodies that sink in throughout the progression of the track, getting you humming along by the second chorus only to knock you with a hard right hook with a noisy outro that might lead into the next tune. “Dread Sovereign” was a favorite; the song is a collection of simple chords with a chorus revolving around traded vocal parts between Meiburg and Oswald—the summation of which is easy to enjoy and difficult to forget.
Some acts are good to see live, yet others are iconic in their performance. It may be much to place Annie Clark (St. Vincent) in the same tier as odd pop fixtures like Thom Yorke, Bjork, or David Burns, but what she might lack in pop culture fame, she makes up for in on-stage enthusiasm. This isn’t to say St. Vincent isn’t popular—anyone from NME, Pitchfork, Rolling Stone, or any randomly named indie blog have lauded St. Vincent with overt praise and rave reviews—just that she lacks a sort of household colloquialism that seems due to her.
It’s a strange site to see someone equipped with such an intense on-stage passion only pull two or three hundred people in such a large town. Her performance radiates electricity, as her musicianship is only surpassed by her charm. Clark effortlessly nails every ambitious vocal melody while simultaneously rocking the off-kilter guitar work that helps define her and carve her on little niche in avant-garde electropop. Her backing band is nothing but support, clinging towards the corners of the stage to give Ms. Clark her space to move and move the music. This works for St. Vincent as an act, as Clark’s presence is a human bug zapper baiting the audience with engrossing stage presence and poise.
Dipping into the past, St. Vincent opened with a single from her second effort Actor with “Marrow.” The spacey intro worked well leading into the track’s chorus—a sweetly sang yet raunchily produced earworm that went over well. “Marrow” then ran into “Cheerleader,” which started the evening’s affair with running through material from the most recent release Strange Mercy. “Cruel,” “Surgeon,” and others were featured and thusly destroyed by Clark’s violent guitar tinkering and the backing band, which kept up with the tight pace. “Dilettante” was the highlight of the evening, with the band providing a spacious backbone that propped Clark’s messy yet charming guitar stabs and damn near perfect vocal performance (an anecdotal introduction referring to VH1’s Storytellers for all of us old enough to catch the reference was included, giving insight to the singer/songwriter’s colorful personality).
Clark’s performance overflows with heart; relentless in her conviction towards her artistic endeavors. An equal helping of stellar stage show and fresh and exciting songwriting makes her worthy of her accrued share of press, and much more to come.
Photos by Andrew J. Brieg
