Everything the listener needs to know about Actor, the second album by Annie Clark, can be inferred in the album's title. It is less a collection of songs than a sequence of guises. The instruments do not just accompany St. Vincent's voice, but create emotional landscapes. The characters St. Vincent puts on are realised more through her backing band than her own performances. So Clark avoids pantomime: Actor is not the overblown spectacle of a concept album.
Instead, in the conceit of St. Vincent's playing characters, she explores the roles of everyday existence. There is a contradiction here. The listener finds Clark's characters at crisis point, confiding their Catch 22 situation. Their sincerity is clear, their desire to solve their trouble overwhelming. Yet they are fictions, present for the track before Clark introduces the next character. The protagonists of Actor are buckling beneath their roles, yet Clark never reveals herself.
Annie Clark is a Nuanced Actor
In other words, Clark cannot be trusted. She is never less than beguiling, and her voice has a primness that captures 'turbulent civility' quite perfectly. For a movie, she would make a fine tortured housewife. Yet by refusing to drop her roles – and making this refusal obvious – she cannot be taken seriously. The problem: the listener cannot tell if she speaks for herself or the character. Though with one hand Clark stakes her sincerity, with the other the listener is kept distant.
To make matters more complex, the refusal to identify herself is St. Vincent's favourite lyric subject. “Now, Now,” the opening cut from first album Marry Me, includes lines like 'I'm not anything at all.' The moment of self-assertion is the moment of self-negation. Clark not only employs smoke and mirrors, but says that she is herself beyond reach. She slips through the listener's fingers at the point where he is finally read to grasp her, then appears as someone different.
In Marry Me this game was chiefly lyrical. Though St. Vincent insisted on being elusive, she maintained a fixed emotional relation with the listener. “Paris Is Burning” is seductive in the manner of someone wanting to be seductive. “Marry Me” is persuasive because St. Vincent has decided to persuade. In other words, though already a great performer on her first release, St. Vincent sought the listener's approval. Marry Me was the first gambit of someone ingratiating herself.
The Turbulent Sound of Actor
By contrast, Actor is the sound of someone thought familiar, confiding their darkest secrets. Opening track “The Strangers” begins with Clark aping a heavenly choir, but soon establishes a fixed rhythm reminiscent of either a quickened heartbeat, or designed to instil headaches. The listener knows this malady is an extension of Clark's character: the backing contrasts her voice while supplementing it. Yet in hearing the song, this malady is made the listener's too.
They say a problem shared is a problem halved. Yet Clark's characters find no relief in their confiding. They only succeed in traumatising the listener, communicating their ills without diminishing them. Actor is an uneasy listen, because each protagonist is trapped at the peak of suffering. The tortured soul of “Laughing With a Mouth of Blood” will always be in his hotel, watching the televangelist. The homebody of “Black Rainbow” will never resolve their domestic ennui.
'Paint the Black Hole Blacker'
To Clark's credit, she says plainly this is what the listener will get. The imperative of “The Strangers” to 'Paint the black hole blacker' makes it quite clear this a collection of downward spirals. But what makes Actor remarkable is how ambiguous it remains. Given Clark's subject matter, the listener may expect death metal and screaming – the unrepentant venting of one's suffering. The veneer of civility remains though, because Clark uses her voice as a beguiling counterpoint.
Take the opening chords of “Laughing With a Mouth of Blood.” The acoustic guitar tones are reminiscent of a summer's day. Listening to these chords, someone might take a nap beneath a willow tree. Yet rising beneath them, a swell of violins suggests a nearing crisis. They slide upwards, like the dawn of a terrible realisation. The track's opening moments plays these instruments off one another, in the same way that Clark's voice plays off the sentiments she expresses.
It is finally tempting to feel sympathy for St. Vincent. The people of Actor express a shared inability to accept themselves: they cannot bear to be known, yet writhe with the isolation that follows. As their architect and their embodiment, it is difficult to avoid ascribing this to Clark herself. Yet the power of Actor derives from this same place: from St. Vincent's genius for combining these elements. Clark is the quintessential artist then, deriving inspiration from her torture.
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