St. Vincent’s Annie Clark was a beautiful alien onstage at the Fillmore last night, clad in a long black dress covered with sparkling, drippy images of cartoon eyes and lips, her hair an arresting shock of silver. The spirit willed her through the first few instrumental minutes of opening number “Rattlesnake,” where she cocked her head from side to side, pointed at us, and pantomimed a stab in her chest while the low synth rumble intensified around her. Eventually, she didn’t pick up a guitar so much as acquiesce to one, positioning herself so a crew member could deposit this magical foreign object around her chest.
That’s how it went, for most of the meticulously plotted set list, whose totality seemed to suggest a story, albeit one that takes some decoding. Each song had its own choreography of secret codes, delivered always by Clark and sometimes by her black-clad bandmates. The movements were mechanical, precise—creating the sense of a performance-art installation. The music—a digital electro-pop gauze enveloping an organic indie-rock core—may sound 21stcentury, but this sort of ritualistic, regimented theatre suggested the great avant-pop acts of the post-punk era, like Devo, Talking Heads and even Kraftwerk.
The stage was minimally furnished, with a two-tiered pedestal at center stage, and Clark milked it at select intervals throughout the show. She stretching sinuously across the lower level like it was a chaise lounge during “I Prefer Your Love” and stood tall atop the upper level like a sentinel during the thunderous “Cheerleader,” possibly the highlight of the set, the defiance of her words rattling the roofs.
Then, at the end of “Prince Johnny,” with its lyric about lying “prostrate on my carpet,” she collapsed from her pedestal, hands over her head, in strobe-magnified despair, like a wounded animal who, for a brief spell, seemed to be pleasuring itself on the lower level: The signal for “Birth in Reverse,” naturally, with its lyric about masturbation. There were certainly no accidents in the transitions and flow of the set list, which felt carefully curated.
The Fillmore’s sound wasn’t perfect last night, as it seemed to be during last week’s immaculate Belle & Sebastian show. The bass too often overpowered the instruments and Clark’s voice, which was all but drowned out during the more ethereal numbers, like “Surgeon.” But these issues evaporated as the show drew to a surprisingly riotous close, thanks to the obscure single “Krokodil”—delivered by Clark like a purifying, punk-rock exorcism—and “Your Lips Are Red,” a masterpiece of quiet-loud-quiet dynamics that took on a more muscular energy than it contains on record.
By the end of it, Clark was among the throng of fans at the front of the stage, letting them shred on her guitar. With her hair shrouding her face under the ballistic strobe lights, she looked indistinguishable from Kurt Cobain. After a set that felt programmed and unspontaneous, it was an utterly rock ‘n’ roll way to end the show, a necessary jolt of anarchy to shake up everybody’s system, including Clark’s own.
SET LIST:
1. Rattlesnake
2. Digital Witness
3. Cruel
4. Marrow
5. Every Tear Disappears
6. I Prefer Your Love
7. Laughing With a Mouth of Blood
8. Actor Out of Work
9. Surgeon
10. Cheerleader
11. Prince Johnny
12. Birth in Reverse
13. Regret
14. Huey Newton
15. Bring Me Your Loves
16. Krokodil
ENCORE
1. Your Lips Are Red
