St. Vincent has done some fairly high-concept tours over the last decade. Going out in support of 2017’s “Masseduction” album, on her synth-pop-glorifying “Fear the Future Tour,” she put pop-art video projections on the big screen, obfuscating masks on her band members, and a lot of latex in the dressing room, to magnify her candy-colored dominatrix look. Conversely, on the tour behind 2021’s “Daddy’s Home,” she combined artifice with actual warmth, letting retro touches push some of the avant-garde flourishes aside. There, she went blond and led a team of backup singers through an old-school soul revue laced with touches of psychedelia.
Her m.o. now? The big concept in 2024 is to put on… a rock show.
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Of course, with St. Vincent, nothing could ever be quite that simple. Hers continues to be a show that invites deep thoughts as well as primal responses. But apart from whatever neural pathways you might be tempted to go down while thinking about her lyrics and themes during the course of a concert, what stands out about the “All Born Screaming Tour” is how minimalist it is. With no video screens, backup singers or sketches, and a lot of electric guitar, it’s the purest distillation of St. Vincent we’ve had on stage in quite a few years. And while we love the acutely conceptual stuff, too, she’s such a riveting talent that you’re drawn to get as close as possible, with or without bells and whistles.
In the interest of that closeness, we caught her at a rare club show she booked on her current tour, which otherwise has her in sizable halls and amphitheaters. Just before playing to a full house at the Greek Theatre in L.A. over the weekend, St. Vincent performed at a venue about one-sixth the size, the 1000-capacity Knitting Factory in Boise, Idaho. It was as glorious 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 does like to engage the fans in front, on this tour, and if you like the thought of having her shout “Hey, what are you looking at?” right at you — as she does in “Broken Man,” the first single from “All Born Screaming” — know that she might glare at you like she’s expecting an answer.
Very little about this tour feels similar to the “Daddy’s Home” outing; they might as well be night and day. As sad as many if not most of the songs were, there was a sort of sunniness to that last album and that tour, with all the playful 1970s cosplay and R&B undertones and literally light hair color. It felt like St. Vincent attempting to humanize herself a little, even if, ironically, it was by playing dress-up. Now, Annie Clark (her non-nom de plume) is still just as humanized on stage, even as her current, haunted brand of rock ‘n’ roll leads her down some dimmer corridors. Leonard Cohen titled one of his latter-day albums “You Want It Darker,” and that would kind of work, too, for St. Vincent’s new album, although you can’t say that “All Born Screaming” doesn’t also get the point across.
Clark made a point of mentioning that she and her band had visited an escape room in Boise on their day off. (She seemed especially delighted that her bass player, Charlotte Kemp Muhl, had seemed to terrify some fair-haired locals on the street outside with her look, which could reasonably be described as a little bit goth.) But escapism, per se, isn’t necessarily St. Vincent’s thing — at least not on “All Born Screaming,” which takes death, mortality and grieving as primary themes.
Clark showed some chutzpah, in that regard, by starting her current setlist off with the slowest and starkest song along those lines from the new album: “Reckless,” the title of of which transmutes into “breathless,” meaning, maybe, deceased. Anyone who’d wandered into the venue just in search of a good time might have wondered what they’d gotten themselves into, with that dramatic and mournful an opening number, with keyboard player Rachel Eckroth playing electronic piano parts that made the song sound like one of Trent Reznor’s least happy melodies. But there’s a reason that “Reckless” makes for such an effective concert opener: once you’ve just about settled into its lulling funereality, it explodes with some pounding half-note power chords, signalling that the somber prologue was ending.
From that omenious opener, it was into the much more energized oldie “Fear the Future,” and the rest of the 80-minute show qualified as a veritable celebration of life. Clark can’t help but see herself as a designated mourner — and that goes for some of the older songs, like “New York” (with its anthemic “I have lost a hero, I have lost a friend” chorus, which never fails to feel touching), as well as new numbers that are themed around loss, like “Sweetest Fruit” and “Hell Is Near.” But the music was so viscerally exciting, and Clark’s demeanor between songs was so friendly, that, well, hell or heaven or whatever awaits seemed very far off. For anyone who gets their kicks from the dynamics of well-played rock ‘n’ roll that feels like something is at stake, it’s hard to imagine a much more high-spirited show.
One of the few things that this tour does have in common with the last is the presence of co-lead guitarist Jason Falkner as her on-stage foil. He gets around, and some music fans will have seen him playing with Beck just prior to the onset of the St. Vincent tour — but Falkner and Beck have a lot less full-body contact than Falkner and Clark do. They are equals in electric-guitar explosiveness, and it was especially a kick when they would play in tandem, as they did in the penultimate “Sugarboy,” doing an intricate twin lead part before breaking off to their own devices, even as they rubbed up against one another’s backs like rambunctious schoolkids.
The two of them share the most obvious esprit de corps in the band, but there was plenty to be said for the others’ contributions. Falkner and Clark put their arms around each other’s shoulders, like buddies, to watch drummer Mark Guiliana go off on a wonderfully thundersous tangent at the wrap-up “Cheerleader.” (You thought St. Vincent was too artsy for anything as old-fashioned as a drum solo? Think again.)
What’s curious, and fetching, is just what a thoroughly dramatic presence Clark can be on stage — no surprise to anyone who’s been paying attention since 2006 — but then, surprisingly, how friendly she can be to an audience. Taking the long-time Bowie comparisons into account, it’s as if Ziggy Stardust suddenly took time out for a friendly, trivial chat every now and again. She told the Boise audience it was the first time she had ever been in Idaho, and at the concert neared its end,she assured everyone that it had been a fabulous “first date.” The subject matter of her asides covered a lot of ground, from Idaho history to her recent search-engine history. “I want to say everything that I’ve learned about your beautiful city as of yet,” she declared. “According to Wikipedia, Lewis and Clark came over the mountains from Utah, which was very arid, and went, ‘Le bois!’ — and somehow it mutated into ‘Boise,’ and I for one am very happy about that.” She added, “And the second thing I learned about your state is that if you try and just do what a normal person might do on a day off in a beautiful city, which is lie in your hotel bed and look at PornHub, it makes you…” — with the crowd drowning out her explanation of whatever hoop she was required to jump through for that leisure activity.
So, obviously, for however sobering an album “All Born Screaming” is, St. Vincent is not one to wear her funeral veil out on her sleeve very much in a concert. Still, even a newbie to her music would likely suss that there are serious underpinnings to songs that can come off as such fun live. Highlights abounded toward the end of the set, especially her first-ever live performance of one of the best songs from the “Daddy’s Home” album, “Somebody Like Me,” a plaintive ballad of insecurity and hope that is as emotionally simple and plaintive as anything she’s ever done. Who knows why she never busted this beautiful song out on the last tour, or the first half of this one, but it deserves to stay in the setlist forever.
And then she closed the show with the title track from “All Born Screaming,” which, if you were to judge from just the title, sounds like possibly a downer way to end a night of entertainment. But as St. Vincent encouraged the crowd to sing along with the hypnotically repeated title phrase, it became clear: A bit of screamo is not a bad thing in her world, and anyway, it is “all born screaming,” not “all died screaming,” so it’s actually meant to be a gently melodic mantra of hope. By show’s end, she might actually have made everyone feel a little bit born again.
