St. Vincent has shared the music video for “Birth in Reverse,” a track off of her 2014 self-titled album.
Annie Clark (St. Vincent) has had a great year; her album even landed in Guitar World's50 Best Albums of 2014.
The minimalist guitarist's style comes through on “Birth in Reverse,” the video for which was directed by Willo Perron.
“It’s funny that you would categorize it as minimalist,” she told Guitar World in the Holiday 2014 issue. “In the context of guitar rock, I could see what I do as being minimal. But in the context of pop music, it’s pushing the level of muso—pushing the limits of what people are hearing in pop music.”
Fair enough. St. Vincent’s robotic, yet oddly vulnerable, post-modern pop songs are packed with subtle complexities, spiky discordant horn charts, polyrhythmic dance grooves and moments of Bowie-esque alien grandeur.
In an overtly electronic landscape, she deploys her guitar as a stealth device, a heat-seeking missile. It sneaks up on you, and startles you at times. What seems like a synth line might turn out to be a guitar. What seems like a guitar might just be the sound of your own imagination. Like a ghost in some Orwellian machine, her guitar is very much an extension of her disarmingly dispassionate, yet somehow highly expressive vocal style.
