St Vincent: MassEducation review – songs stripped down to the barest bones

MassEducation
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Artist: St Vincent
Genre: Alternative
Label: Loma Vista Recordings

A year ago (to the week) Annie Clark released her fifth album, Masseduction. Co-produced by Clark and Jack Antonoff, and featuring songs drenched in the influences of David Bowie, Massive Attack, Prince and David Byrne, the album is a tour de force of sensual textures and tonal shifts.

One year later, with the addition of a single vowel in the album title, the songs remain but they are each spectres of their former lives. As "re-envisioning" or "reimagining" goes, MassEducation is a stark about-turn.

Recorded in August last year as Masseduction was being mixed, such instant re-evaluation (with no rehearsals or pre-planning) sheds light on Clark as an artist who is wide open to viewing her work from contrasting angles.

With only piano (by Thomas Bartlett) as accompaniment, there is a spartan intimacy akin to – as Clark has said – “two dear friends playing songs together with the kind of secret understanding one can only get through endless nights in New York City”.

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Geography notwithstanding, such intimacy invests the songs with a mournfulness that wasn’t necessarily apparent on the source album. Now? All is laid bare.

Tony Clayton-Lea

Tony Clayton-Lea

Tony Clayton-Lea is a contributor to The Irish Times specialising in popular culture