Review: St. Vincent’s Daddy’s Home Confronts Domestic Strife with Pop Flair

The artist’s sixth solo album matches pitch-perfect ’70s-retro stylings with testy lyrical themes.

St. Vincent, Daddy's Home
Photo: Nasty Little Man

There was a time, not so long ago, when a musician like Annie Clark teaming up with a super-producer like Jack Antonoff would be seen as an affront to the artist’s indie bona fides. But in the poptimism era, no one seems too perturbed that both 2017’s Masseduction and, now, Daddy’s Home—both co-produced by Antonoff—make Clark’s early albums sound like rough sketches for what she really wanted to do all along.

Whether or not you believe that Masseduction is missing the experimental flair of St. Vincent’s previous efforts, it’s an in-your-face statement on which Antonoff helped bring Clark’s nascent sexpot pop-chanteuse tendencies to the fore. And like that album, Daddy’s Home is slicker and more professional—and resultantly, more conventional—than anything she’s released to date. And yet, the album’s pitch-perfect ’70s-retro stylings and testy lyrical themes are just as challenging as anything on 2011’s Strange Mercy.

It’s always been easy to imagine Clark as an artist transported from the ’70s, cutting a lithe, androgynous figure on a concert stage right alongside Lou Reed, Marc Bolan, or the Spiders from Mars. The strutting “Pay Your Way in Pain,” the opening track of Daddy’s Home, will certainly do nothing to quell the Bowie comparisons, as the track is clearly indebted to the late icon’s classic “Fame,” down to the way Clark pleadingly elongates the vowel in “paaaiiin.” But the rest of the album doesn’t hit any of the obvious glam notes, as Antonoff and Clark ensconce these songs in clavichord, Wurlitzer, electric sitar, and a dampened heartbeat drum sound that, in toto, perfectly capture the style and vibe of classic ’70s funk, soul, and folk-rock.

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While there’s plenty of retro ear candy and creative instrumentation all over Daddy’s Home, the druggy, spacious production style that was fashionable in the early-to-mid-’70s is a far cry from Masseduction’s modern, maximalist pop approach. Antonoff and Clark nail it so completely that even a song like “…At the Holiday Party,” which opens with muted acoustic guitar and builds to a cathartic, dense climax complete with horns and chanting, still sounds more tailored to last call at a dive bar than the encore at a sold-out show. The energy of “Pay Your Way in Pain” and the Prince-indebted “Down” are anomalous, as the rest of the album is a slow, gauzy, hung-over-sounding affair.

Instead of talking about a night out, Clark instead sings blearily about the next morning’s comedown (“Down and Out Downtown”), and when she allows herself an increasingly rare guitar workout, it’s an atmospheric capper to a hazy, six-and-a-half minute Lou Reed-inspired ballad (“Live in the Dream”). “Brown liquor/Why not? Sure/Like the heroines of Cassavetes/I’m underneath the influence daily,” Clark woozily intones on “The Laughing Man,” articulating the album’s bombed-in-’70s-New-York aesthetic almost too perfectly.

Daddy’s Home turns into a celebration of a bygone milieu at certain points, like the breezily groovy, disarmingly sweet “The Melting of the Sun,” with its plethora of lyrical references to ’70s rock, and “Candy Darling,” a touching ode to the eponymous trans actress and Warhol superstar. For the most part, though, the throwback trappings become more of a backdrop for thorny, psychosexual family drama. Inspired by the recent prison release of her father, who spent most of the last decade incarcerated for stock-related fraud, Clark alludes to these real-life circumstances throughout the album in manners both oblique—the opening line of “The Laughing Man” (“9-1-1/I’m in love”)—and bitingly direct.

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Both “My Baby Wants a Baby” and the sassy title track are rife with pointed lyrics that scan almost as double entendres in reverse, playing off audience expectations after Masseduction’s overtly sexual themes, when in actuality Clark is singing about visiting Dad in prison and grappling with what it all means for her family’s future. On the former track, one of the album’s standouts, she wonders: “What in the world, what in the world, would my baby say?/‘I got your eyes and your mistakes.’” It’s moments like these that illustrate how expertly the musician walks a perilous tightrope on Daddy’s Home, an impeccably produced album that deeply honors her arty influences and leaves room for complex and difficult lyrical themes that should please poptimists and indie kids alike.

Score: 
 Label: Loma Vista  Release Date: May 14, 2021  Buy: Amazon

Jeremy Winograd

Jeremy Winograd studied music and writing at Bennington College, where he did his senior thesis on Drive-By Truckers. He has written for Rolling Stone and Time Out New York. He and his wife met on a White Stripes message board.

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