St Vincent
3Olympia
★★★★☆
It is a few songs in before Annie Clark, aka St Vincent, breaks focus to greet the Sunday faithful, and with her tender tone, it’s as if she is talking to old friends. In a way she is, given she mentions her debut show in Dublin almost 17 years ago. Tonight, the subject of time does not exactly weigh heavy, but it is weighed up.
Much of the show is made up of Clark’s most recent record All Born Screaming, with Reckless setting the scene, as Clark, in reshaped half-tuxedo narrates a tale of obsessive attachment. Every song seems to complement or bleed into another in ways, from the dark romance of Fear the Future, to Los Ageless and Big Time Nothing – both of which seem to call upon the spirit of Prince.
Prince is an interesting reference point, as he is such a natural antecedent for St Vincent, who flits and frets and flies around the stage with a woozy grace, like a frustrated ballerina gone rogue towards a life of gothic mystery. That sense of mystery is at the heart of St Vincent’s work, amplified in something like the slippery Dilettante, with its glassy glow and scuzzy guitars, the vaudeville-blues infused Pay Your Way in Pain, or the wonky beautiful Cheerleader.
Accompanied by her brilliant band – Jason Falkner, Mark Guiliana, Rachel Eckroth and Charlotte Kemp Muhl – the show contains a nuanced power that explodes on something like the elegant Violent Times, a song that speaks of “all of the wasted nights chasing mortality”, it is an epic piece of work, tapping into the majesty of someone like Shirley Bassey and her harnessing of emotional landscapes. Perhaps that is what made the show not only interesting, but affecting, with Clark deeply immersed in those emotional landscapes, and while still wry and witty, there is a playfulness that lifts the room, to the point where someone from the crowd gleefully exclaims “yippee!”.
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Clark’s work has often been about playing off tensions, but it is also about sitting in the ebb and flow of things, acknowledging that nothing quite stays the same, with songs that sometimes stomp around in heavy weather ending up resembling a tattered folk song – they are always surprising journeys. She prefaces New York by wondering aloud how many people from the countryside came to the city to be themselves, to mumbles from the crowd, but by the end of the song she has taken us towards something vital and fundamental.
Romance is the lifeblood of this show, but it is a hard-wrought, wrung-out, fought-for kind of lifeblood, the kind that is not only interested in speaking to the living, but the dead, and a recognition that we all live among ghosts. As Clark comes back for the encore, the salty sweetness that is Somebody Like Me, she asks “does it make you an angel or some kind of freak to believe enough in somebody like me?”, the answer is clear: both.
