St. Vincent - Daddy's Home

May 14, 2021 - Loma Vista

I can’t believe it, but St. Vincent’s 6th album is here, and it walked into the room dressed in pure white for the party that I didn’t even know was happening. You know, the party where we all travel backward—or laterally—in time to our future-perfect vision of the 1970s to remind ourselves just how incredible the music and culture of that era was? We who lived it and we who didn’t luxuriate in our love of that time in a now where the hypnosis of modern life dulls our awareness of the baggage of that era (which we still carry hidden, hanging off our side saddles). 

In Daddy’s Home, Annie Clark wields the sheen in one hand and the grit in the other and moves comfortably across the stage, displacing the psychedelic atmosphere and leveraging all the matter in that sparkly environment to share her story of conflicting impulses in an overwhelming reality. Her words are playful yet direct, candid and open, with a loose and expert delivery. St. Vincent lays her muse down at the altar of 70s rock goddesses and gods and is rewarded with a golden touch. The album’s title refers to the fact that her father was recently released from jail. Using daddy’s music to discuss her relationship with her father and family, her relationship with herself as a female rock star, her relationships with lovers who want to have children while she does not, and her relationship with society’s expectations at large, Clark lays herself bare with contemplative air despite hiding behind an alter ego inspired by the tragic blonde of actress Candy Darling. Like any great actor, she finds what she needs to express herself honestly when she takes on the identity of someone or something else. 

St. Vincent loves a good concept for all her albums, and this body of work seems to reside in the duality of pleasure and pain. Such as loving an incarcerated father who abandoned you as a child, or how love can feel like an emergency when you’ve lost someone close to you, or how someone who loves you back can seem like both a “genius” and a “fool” depending on how you are feeling about yourself in an instant, or the empowerment in the endured hostility of the female musicians who paved the way for you to have a musical career. True to her style, Clark lets ambiguity be uncomfortably in the room. In ‘Daddy’s Home’, she sings like a dolled-up Bond girl being visited by a lover she calls “daddy” in her swanky apartments, but the lyrics are about her actual father. In ‘My Baby Wants a Baby,’ “baby” refers both to her lover and to the child she won’t have with her lover, melting the lines between them as she ruminates on how parents are doomed to repeat their parents’ mistakes and how expectations can overshadow everything else. 

Like her previous work, every song is committed to the theater of the album in impeccable precision. Clark overtly references both herself and her musical influences in the songs, lyrically and stylistically. From start to finish, Daddy’s Home is a complete experience and will remind you of a lot of other songs you know, sometimes with irritating specificity. Additional track highlights include the anthemic opener ‘Pay Your Way in Pain’, where a truth spills out of the kettle after a boiling of manic tension; the fight song fantasy ‘Down’; the Pink-Floyd-double-take ‘Live In The Dream’; and the sharp callout of ‘... At the Holiday Party’, which made me feel very much seen by Clark’s gaze. 

The character on Daddy’s Home is grappling with cumbersome existential discrepancies. Though the songs sting, they are not without optimism, containing a strong dose of nostalgia and some really excellent guitar riffs. St. Vincent knows that a perfectly executed 70s dreamland is currently a safe space where we can hear these painful explorations. This stone is polished so much by our touch that we can see our reflections when we look at it. But it’s smooth, cool and pleasant to put our hands on. ☔