David Byrne & St. Vincent: Love This Giant

DAVID BYRNE & ST. VINCENT: LOVE THIS GIANT (2012)

1) Who; 2) Weekend In The Dust; 3) Dinner For Two; 4) Ice Age; 5) I Am An Ape; 6) The Forest Awakes; 7) I Should Watch TV; 8) Lazarus; 9) Optimist; 10) Lightning; 11) The One Who Broke Your Heart; 12) Outside Of Space & Time.

General verdict: A curiously clumsy pop artefact whose pretense does not at all seem to match the emotional power and meaning of its melodies. In other words, "I respect this, but it sucks".

Since I have no immediate plans to cover the colorful career of Annie Clark, a.k.a. St. Vincent, and since this album is genuinely a balanced collaboration between her and David Byrne, we might just as well file this under Byrneʼs discography for the moment. As we know, David is a big fan of joint projects, and some of his past collaborative activities clearly show why — My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts, for one thing, is a classic that did require the joint talents of Byrne and Eno to deserve that status. But as the new millennium came into being, and with it, the added yearning to stay «relevant» in the world of artistic evolution, it is only natural that he would begin seeking out younger collaborators from the next generation.

On paper, St. Vincent might look like the perfect choice — she is young enough to be Davidʼs daughter, she is an unconventional pop artist with a predilection for all things weird and eccentric, and she has been compared to just about everybody in the art-pop world, from Bowie to Kate Bush and beyond. Taking the vintage boomer madness of David Byrne and synthesizing it with the fresh millennial creativity of St. Vincent seems like an instant-win formula, and such is the impression that you get from reading quite a few glowing reviews in the mainstream press — yet on the whole, the reaction was mixed, and the album never got truly enshrined as a classic for either Byrne or Annie Clark... and I think I can see why.

Love This Giant is definitely very «creative». The basic idea, suggested by St. Vincent, was to write a set of pop songs around brass-based arrangements, because... because why not. This does give an aura of relative sameness to the proceedings, but since the brass melodies themselves follow all sorts of different patterns, from classic R&B to Latin to marching bands to Radiohead-style freakouts (think ʽThe National Anthemʼ), this is not a big problem. The songs themselves are complex, twisted artefacts, with intricate and unpredictable combinations of brass, drums (largely programmed), synth bass, convoluted vocal overdubs from the two main singers, and surprisingly little guitar, in spite of Annieʼs well-advertised mastery of the instrument. It is hard to define their relative genres and even harder to ascribe specific meanings to their vividly impressionistic lyrics. But isnʼt that a sign of elusive genius?..

Actually, not quite. As the songs slowly sink in, listen after listen, I begin to understand that this is the kind of record that I, at best, will remember with polite respect, but not with the kind of emotional admiration that my conscience reserves for true genius. Like most other acclaimed art-pop wizards of the 2000s, such as Sufjan Stevens (whose touring band Annie was actually in before embarking on a proper solo career) and Joanna Newsom, St. Vincent is one of those Artists who spend way too much time wiring up the neon lights to the big A — instead of, at least sometimes, just cutting loose and telling things the way they are. Whenever she takes the wheel on this album, I definitely get that she is trying to do something, but I almost never get what it is exactly that she is trying to do; and when I do seem to get it, it turns out that I have to think about it rather than feel about it, which is simply not the way that genius art works. It does not help, either, that she has a fairly common singing voice and that, whenever she does get to play the guitar, she is quite mediocre at it (I know that Annieʼs guitar playing is sometimes toted as iconic for female players, but I am not sure how anybody seriously familiar with the story of guitar playing from Hendrix to Belew to Prince to, say, Marc Ribot could characterize her work as anything but amateurish in nature).

Still, passable singing and guitar playing do not matter much if the songwriting and general artistry are top level, and these songs are not top level. All are credited jointly to David and Annie, and there is a visible effort to somewhat synthesize the styles of the two, but, at the very least, they are still separated by who takes lead vocal on what, and it also seems as if St. Vincent is really, really, really trying to out-weird David at his own game, so the Byrne-led songs actually sound a bit more conventional, both melody-wise and lyrics-wise, than Annieʼs. What is worse, with all due respect to those who are sick and tired of the word «chemistry», there is about as much of it in between the two artists as the album cover, on which they look like two long-lost separated members of the Addams Family, suggests.

The record does set out with a bit of a promise: ʽWhoʼ is a good example of a Byrne dirge, with a touching vocal melody that goes from confused verse to plaintive chorus — except that Annieʼs melismatic bridge of "who is an honest man?" does not fit in well, sounding more like a random interpolation from some other song (say, about a cheating lover or something) than part of an ongoing dialog between the two protagonists. Actually, there is very little dialog between Byrne and St. Vincent anywhere on the album: every once in a while, they sing a few lines in unison, usually with one singer clearly overshadowing the other, and thatʼs it. The record feels more like a Meistersingersʼ competition than a truly joint project.

On the St. Vincent side, a typical song will be something like ʽIce Ageʼ, with its metronomic mid-tempo rhythm, quietly and inobtrusively bubbling brass riffage, and unconventionally accentuated words ("oh dia-MOND... all unbutTONED..."). Stare at the lyrics long enough and you will get the idea that the song is about an emotionally obstructed partner, but the idea is not at all supported by the music, which, at best, sounds like inoffensive jazz-pop on tranquilizers. Did I say there is no chemistry between St. Vincent and Byrne? Well, much of the time there is even no chemistry between St. Vincent and the music that backs her up: the potentially gorgeous Cocteau Twins-ish falsetto refrain of "we wonʼt know how much we lost until the winter thaws" loses its impact in the company of that ugly synth bass line and those meandering, decidedly un-romantic brass patterns. Unconventional experimental patterns like these are scattered all through the album, but rarely, if ever, end up making much emotional sense.

On the Byrne side, a typical song will be something like ʽI Should Watch TVʼ, another of Davidʼs ironic portrayals of the confused urban dweller; but it has been a long time since David last managed to convincingly act out a paranoid existence, and neither the vocal melody nor the usual atmospheric brass arrangement help the song to become memorable. Sometimes he falls back on classic vocal tricks — ʽDinner For Twoʼ distantly echoes ʽDonʼt Worry About The Governmentʼ, for instance — but doing so does not bring back the energy of classic Talking Heads, not when the music is dominated by this math-rockish approach to brass playing.

Overall, I would not want to make any hasty generalizations, and Iʼd even be totally open to taking some of the nasty things said above back if they ever gave me a second chance — all I can say for sure is that Love This Giant was built upon one daring, experimental idea («let us make an album that has saxophones and trombones as the main instruments and does not sound like Blood, Sweat & Tears!»), and that the idea did not work. It is perfectly possible to teach yourself to love this giant, uh, I mean, album — just latch on to its complexity, its multiple layers, its symbolism, its clear desire to produce something fresh and intelligent — but, honestly, I just do not have that much love in me to forcefully waste it on this kind of record.