Worth remembering: Annie “St Vincent” Clark’s college band was called the Skull Fuckers. The guitarist is no stranger to coaxing hairy sounds out of her instrument, nor to drilling down to uncouth feelings within. After a series of albums with slicker sound palettes, she has gone dark and heavy for her seventh studio , All Born Screaming; heavy-hitter Dave Grohl plays apocalyptic drums on a pair of tracks. Clark’s first entirely self-produced work, it aims to recreate the noises in her head without a filter. Gloriously unstable modular synths often figure. Apparently it took dozens of vocal takes to strike the right timbre of desolation on Hell Is Near, the bleak first cut.
At the other end of the record, the title track highlights the suffering in the human condition – and simultaneously, the fact that the pain means we’re alive. In between, Clark touches on lust, loss and death in a more direct manner than her highly stylised personae often allow for. From the noisy low end of lead track Broken Man, through Flea’s prowling industrial pop and the superlative goth jazz, Bond-like theme of Violent Times, it’s a loud and unapologetically varied work.
Only Clark knows why So Many Planets had to be rendered as three-legged reggae-pop, but Reckless is a magnificent rendering of keeping vigil over a dying loved one, and the emotional aftermath.
