St. Vincent’s tour confirms her status as a rock queen: concert report

St. Vincent has done some pretty ambitious tours over the past decade. On her synthpop-glorifying “Fear the Future Tour” in support of 2017’s “Masseduction” album, she showed off pop-art video projections on the big screen, wore her band members’ disguising masks, and wore lots of latex in the dressing room to enhance her candy-colored dominatrix look. On the 2021 “Daddy’s Home” tour, however, she combined artificiality with genuine warmth, letting retro touches push aside some of the avant-garde flourishes. There, she wore blonde hair and led a team of backing singers through an old-school soul revue with psychedelic overtones.

Your plan now? The big concept for 2024 is to put on a rock show.

Of course, nothing can be that simple with St. Vincent. Her show remains one that invites deep thought and primal reactions. But aside from the neural pathways you might take during a concert while thinking about her lyrics and themes, what’s striking about the All Born Screaming Tour is how minimalistic it is. With no video screens, backing singers or skits and plenty of electric guitar, this is the purest distillation of St. Vincent we’ve seen on stage in a few years. And while we love the extremely conceptual stuff too, she’s such a captivating talent that you try to get as close to her as possible, with or without the bells and whistles.

To get that closeness, we caught her at a rare club show she booked for her current tour, which usually takes her to large venues and amphitheaters. Just before playing to a sold-out crowd at LA’s Greek Theater over the weekend, St. Vincent performed at a venue about one-sixth the size, the Knitting Factory in Boise, Idaho, which holds 1,000. It was as great an experience as you’d expect if you’re a fan, and if you’re a fan of Eye Contact With the Stars, St. Vincent likes to engage the fans on this tour, and if you like the idea of ​​making them scream, ““Hey, what are you staring at?” straight at you – like in “Broken Man,” the first single from All Born Screaming – you know she might be glaring at you, as if expecting an answer.

Very little about this tour is reminiscent of the “Daddy’s Home” tour; they might as well be night and day. As sad as many, if not most, of the songs were, there was a certain levity to the last album and tour, with all the playful 1970s cosplay and R&B undertones and literally bright hair color. It felt like St. Vincent was trying to make herself a little more human, even if it was ironically through disguise. Now, Annie Clark (her non-pseudonym) is still just as human onstage, even if her current, spooky brand of rock ‘n’ roll takes her into darker realms. Leonard Cohen called one of his recent albums “You Want It Darker,” and that would kind of work for St. Vincent’s new album, too, though you can’t say “All Born Screaming” doesn’t get the message across as well.

Clark specifically mentioned that she and her band had visited an escape room in Boise on their day off. (She seemed particularly pleased that her bassist, Charlotte Kemp Muhl, had terrified some blonde locals on the street with her appearance, which could be described as somewhat gothic.) But Escapismin itself, is not necessarily St. Vincent’s thing – at least not in “All Born Screaming”, whose main themes are death, mortality and grief.

Clark showed some chutzpah in that regard, starting her current setlist with the slowest and strongest song in that vein from the new album: “Reckless,” whose title morphs into “breathless,” which perhaps means “dead.” Anyone who came to the venue just looking for a good time might have wondered what they were getting themselves into with that dramatic and mournful opening number, which featured keyboardist Rachel Eckroth playing electronic piano parts that made the song sound like one of Trent Reznor’s unhappiest tunes. But there’s a reason “Reckless” is such an effective concert opener: Just when you’ve settled into its lulling mournful elegance, it explodes with some pounding semitone power chords, signaling that the grim prologue is coming to an end.

From that ominous opener, it was on to the far more energetic oldie “Fear the Future,” and the rest of the 80-minute show was a true celebration of life. Clark can’t help but see herself as a certified mourner – and that’s true on some of the older songs, like “New York” (with its anthemic refrain “I lost a hero, I lost a friend” that’s always touching), as well as new numbers that revolve around loss, like “Sweetest Fruit” and “Hell Is Near.” But the music was so exciting, and Clark’s demeanor between songs was so kind, that, well, hell or heaven or whatever awaited you seemed very far away. For anyone who gets their kicks from the dynamics of well-played rock’n’roll that feels like something’s at stake, it’s hard to imagine a much more exuberant show.

One of the few things this tour has in common with the last is the presence of co-lead guitarist Jason Falkner as their onstage counterpart. He travels a lot, and some music fans will see him playing with Beck near the start of the St. Vincent tour—but Falkner and Beck have much less full-body contact than Falkner and Clark. They’re equal in electric guitar explosiveness, and it was especially exciting when they played in tandem, like on the penultimate “Sugarboy,” where they played an intricate double lead part before breaking off on their own, even as they rubbed against each other’s backs like wild schoolchildren.

The two have the most obvious esprit de corps in the band, but there was plenty to be said about each other’s contributions, too. Falkner and Clark wrapped their arms around each other’s shoulders like buddies to watch drummer Mark Guiliana go on a wonderfully thunderous excursion on the closing song, “Cheerleader.” (Thought St. Vincent was too artsy for something as old-fashioned as a drum solo? Think again.)

What is strange and fascinating is the thoroughly dramatic presence that Clark can display on stage – no surprise to anyone who has been paying attention since 2006 – but then, surprisingly, how friendly she can be for an audience. Considering the long-standing comparisons to Bowie, it’s as if Ziggy Stardust suddenly took the time every now and then for friendly, inconsequential conversation. She told the audience in Boise that it was her first time in Idaho, and as the concert drew to a close, she assured everyone that it had been a fabulous “first date.” The topics of her ramblings covered a wide range, from Idaho history to her recent search engine history. “I want to say everything I’ve learned so far about your beautiful city,” she explained. “According to Wikipedia, Lewis and Clark came over the mountains from Utah, which was very dry, shouting ‘Le bois!’ – and somehow it mutated into ‘Boise,’ and I for one am very happy about that.” She added, “And the second thing I’ve learned about your state is that if you try to just do what a normal person would do on a day off in a beautiful city, which is lie in your hotel bed and watch PornHub, you…” – with the crowd drowning out her explanation of the hurdles she had to overcome to pursue this pastime.

As sobering as the album All Born Screaming is, St. Vincent is obviously not one to wear her mourning veil very openly in concert. Still, even someone new to her music would probably recognize that there is serious underpinnings to songs that can come across as so entertaining live. There were many highlights toward the end of the set, particularly her first-ever live performance of one of the best songs from the album Daddy’s Home, “Somebody Like Me,” a plaintive ballad about uncertainty and hope that is as emotionally simple and plaintive as anything she’s ever done. Who knows why she never played this beautiful song on the last tour or in the first half of this one, but it deserves to remain on the setlist forever.

And then she closed the show with the title song of “All Born Screaming,” which, judging by the title alone, sounds like a potentially depressing end to an entertaining evening. But as St. Vincent encouraged the crowd to sing along to the hypnotically repeated title phrase, it became clear: A little screamo is not a bad thing in her world, and besides, it is Is “Everyone was born screaming,” not “Everyone died screaming,” so it’s actually meant to be a gently melodic mantra of hope. By the end of the show, it may have actually made everyone feel a little bit reborn.