“Is Jack Antonoff involved with this? Please, say ‘no'”, writes one user. “No Jack Antonoff?”, asks another. “Literally, thank God”, answers the third one. You can find a lot of such comments about this album on different music forums, Reddit, and social media, and this is partly the most crucial point in the discussion of this release.
In far, far 2019, the provocative and shocking indie star and two-time Grammy winner Anne Clark, widely known as St. Vincent, cut a rug at the Grammys with rising pop star and also a proud holder of two Grammy awards, Dua Lipa. Just one year later, the latter had felt something in the air and caught a zeitgeist, launching a new “disco-influenced production” trend with her second album, Future Nostalgia. It brought her a third Grammy. Over the next three years, many musicians were moving in the same direction, from Jessie Ware and Róisín Murphy to Sophie Ellis-Bextor and Kylie Minogue. Among them was St. Vincent, with her disco-infused Daddy’s Home, which also expanded her Grammy collection to three statuettes.
That album was produced in collaboration with Jack Antonoff and represented the first significant left turn in her 18-year career span in 2021. After Masseduction, praised in every corner, that was an audacious experiment that absolutely didn’t fit into her Bowie-inspired guitar-laden art pop catalogue and was evaluated by several influential publications as her most middling venture. In 2023, she had landed in 26th place on Rolling Stone’s ultimate list of the 250 greatest guitarists of all time, which, in a way, predicted her comeback to her experimental roots with the addition of a lot of loud, distorted, and roaring guitars in her seventh studio record All Born Screaming. “Once I’m in, you can’t get rid of me”, she quite justifiably sang in the second single ‘Flea’.
Only one Thundercat-reminiscent funky bassline on ‘Big Time Nothing’ reminds us of her ’70s sound experiments now. Clark did a smart trick by releasing as singles this big-time hit, the good old buoyant, rocky ‘Flea’, and Pink Floyd-inspired, ‘Broken Man’. Beginning to introduce the listeners to the album with signature art pop and mantra-like laid-back vocals, she attracted her old core audience — to sell them something new. Darker and more hardcore-ish sonics with an injection of a sleazy alternative in these singles made the upcoming record even more intriguing back then. Still, the thing is that almost all other songs on All Born Screaming are brassy and vivid melodramas. Except for the tunes mentioned above, the highly bouncing and playful ‘Sweetest Fruit’, and The Benny Hill Show-worthy ‘So Many Planets’, St. Vincent goes for a more reserved and introspective sound.
Galactic folk-bent piano opener ‘Hell Is Near’ sets the stage for the whole album. “Half-burned candle, a picture pinned on the wall / Letters, records, and ash on linoleum”, sings Clark as if we had come to the last song at a party. ‘Reckless’, with its understated sound, very Trent Reznor/Atticus Ross piano notes, and Jungle-evoking synth plucks, only exacerbates this feeling, as though we are listening to the record from end to beginning. However, the most impressive part begins only in the back half, when Clark stops flirting with old sounds and embraces the new, more honest and vulnerable image of herself with ‘Violent Times’, where she is bitten by Bond instead of the usual Byrne or Bowie biters. Barbara Broccoli, who is responsible for the 007 film series, definitely needs to hear this.
Speaking of the loaded Chekhov’s rifle at the beginning of the article, viz. Jack Antonoff, All Born Screaming is the first album entirely produced by Clark, without his or John Congleton’s help. This is evident from the beginning — her sonics have become more raw, loud, and punk-ish, whereas overall integrity has become more vague. She doesn’t hesitate to turn up the heat with more atmospheric, sometimes even comical and chaotic, and guitar-driven sounds. The latter, from time to time, evokes Sleater-Kinney’s The Center Won’t Hold produced by her. Perhaps it’s her most somber and simultaneously joyous record to date. Alongside the gorgeous Angelo Badalamenti-meets-dEUS ‘The Power’s Out’, we can find a 7-minute-long dub-indebted epic ‘All Born Screaming’. The playful Doors-like cut ‘So Many Planets’ is adjacent to the club-ready Sophie tribute ‘Sweetest Fruit’. All of these factors contribute to the listening experience being more varied and predictable at the same time.
“This is what happens when you drop Jack Antonoff as a producer”, writes one of St. Vincent’s listeners on the internet. And this phrase can be perceived ambiguously. Maybe she got away from Antonoff, as some fans dreamed, and did exactly the record she wanted — uninhibited, diverse, and free. Albeit, with freedom sometimes comes a whole new mess, as Angel Olsen sang. And this inconsistency, which is common to self-produced records, is the weakest and, concurrently, the most intriguing part of All Born Screaming. This is the best time to recall Clark’s stomach-punching live performance with Dua Lipa. They blended almost incomparable things there: stadium-worthy summer big bam boom with conceptual art pop, and this album feels precisely the same way — exciting but mixed.
Anyways, the value of All Born Screaming is quite easy to understand just by relistening to Masseduction, which in comparison sounds too plastic, overly polished, and melodically indistinct — it represents highly thoughtful production with a thought-provoking concept but lacks spontaneity, rawness, and sonic diversity. Here, Clark connected the playfulness of Daddy’s Home with the eclecticism of her early works, finally achieving one of her most unpredictable, disobedient, and wicked works to date. A work that can only be done by a broken man in violent times. And if you overthink about that, she might ask you in ‘Broken Man’, “Hey, what are you looking at?”, adding in ‘Big Time Nothing’, “Don’t trip, sashay”, which can be answered only this way: “You talkin’ to me, huh?”
