All Born Screaming, is a truimphant return to form for St Vincent. For a couple of albums there has been a distinct tilt towards presentational style over musical substance. All Born Screaming, however, more than matches the musical coherence evident on 2014's Digital Witness. Snaps of funk, heavy metal and the psycho guitar cutting across it, she's utilised since working with David Byrne. Her present visual look resembles a heavily made up inflatable sex manikin.
One of the qualities I've appreciated about St Vincent's music is the way she plays around with musical tropes, wrong footing your expectations. So on the album's title track, All Born Screaming, starts as a gently lilting song, that morphs into a break in a dub echo chamber, to emerge as a repeated choral refrain that rises to climax via an increasingly thumping dance rythym. Yeah, unexpected.
Similar unexpected trajectories accompany other album highlights. Violent Times is sung and orchestrated as though its a Bond film theme song.
Broken Man starts with a sparse musical soundscape that is broken into by a earthshaking guitar riff that only gets more and more thunderously heavy with metal, as St Vincent's voice becomes angrily distraught. This is terrific.
Big Time Nothing is the track that owes the most to mid period Talking Heads. A superb funk workout, with a vocal line as dry as a desert. St Vincent expertly tip toes along the boundary between infectious song writing and arty musical pretension. Her desire to amuse, startle and unnerve probably affects the possibility of her ever breaking into mainstream success. Yet it is this shifting of her musical perspective and persona that I really love about her work. In a time when perhaps its not that popular a musical genre anymore, St Vincent is constantly proving there's life and meaning to be found in art pop-rock still.
CARROT REVIEW - 6/8
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