Much was made of it being an altogether darker and more aggressive collection than the preceding St. While I remember being taken with the airy-yet-claustrophobic mood of the album and how all the melted plastic guitars were a sort of digital psychedelia, the perceptions of Strange Mercy at the time were interestingly divided. The curlicue woodwinds and haunted Disney fantasias of Actor had been replaced with a strung-out, artificial world, one where Clark could begin to truly show the scope of her sonic ambition. The smog, the mist, the now radically unfamiliar chill in the air, the imposing and often faceless towering buildings in Shanghai - not unlike the abandoned city in Inception, despite the perpetually clogged foot traffic on Shanghai’s street level - these were all perfect for the silver dreamscapes of Annie Clark’s new album. Vincent album I’d been anticipating for months. A few of us had planned to walk across town, and I threw in my headphones to hear the St. The day I got it was one of the first mercifully cool days after the brutal heat and rain season that had greeted us in our initial days abroad. If memory serves, I had to have my dad buy the CD - because I still wanted everything on CD back then - and email me the files, because you couldn’t access the album in China. The first time I heard Strange Mercy was during a semester abroad in Shanghai. Vincent and achieved a synthetic art-rock style that was, in that moment, all her own. The songs of Strange Mercy indeed wound up being generally strong, but it’s also an album trading in adventurous textures and foreign sounds - not at all a back-to-basics exercise, but something that imploded pre-existing notions of St. Then she rejoined producer John Congleton they’d already discussed cutting away the orchestration of Actor and focusing on the foundations of the songs.
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In an interview with the AV Club, she called it a “loneliness experiment,” a different kind of creative process that allowed her to crack open the songs differently, even if there were days where she was dying to be in a place where she could meet a friend for drinks. In Seattle, she holed up in an Ace Hotel and a studio rented from Death Cab For Cutie.
She had to get away from the distractions of her normal life, and the repetition of writing at her apartment. Vincent became an entity unto herself, beginning a course that would make her one of the iconic musicians of the 2010s for her ability to overhaul aesthetic and concept almost entirely from album to album.Īfter touring behind 2009’s Actor, Clark decamped to Seattle to try and work on a followup. When Strange Mercy came out 10 years ago today, St. Mechanistic, icy, otherworldly - and, for the first time but not the last, transcending any narrative or music scene or associations. Vincent, one of mutated sounds, glassy atmospherics, and narcotic haze. Gone were the harsh contrasts between the light and the dark. Gone were any remnants of twee Brooklyn indie affectations. It was the first great transformation of St.