The new video for “Digital Witness” shows us a dull, angular urban landscape. It’s all sharp-edged buildings, pastel colours and concrete. It looks a little like a campus for a university devoted to computer science, where all the students sit hunched over their laptops all day.
But by song’s end, I had a darker, more ominous feeling about the song and her video: it seemed less like a school than a dystopian future. And, for some reason, I can’t shake the feeling that she’s been reading The Orphan Master’s Son, Adam Johnson’s dark novel set in North Korea. But there was something else I couldn’t put my finger on at first.
There’s always been a dark undertone to St. Vincent’s music. At first, it seems cheery enough: there’s a stomping, horn-laden groove on “Marrow”, off of her 2009 album Actor, but the chorus is little more than her repeating, “Help me, help me” over and over. Or there’s “Laughing With a Mouth of Blood”, maybe Actor’s darkest song: “All of my old friends aren’t so friendly / All of my old haunts are now haunting me.”
Strange Mercy, her most recent album, had similar touches: “Cheerleader” seemed like an admission of something (“I played dumb when I knew better,” etc.) as the singer looked for a new direction, casting off an assumed image. But by the next song, she’s slinging vicious insights: “They could take or leave you, so they took you and they left you.” In the song’s video, she’s kidnapped while buying some milk, treated like shit by a vicious little girl, her father, and then buried alive.
What really set the tone on her last two albums was her outstanding guitar work. Her solo on “Cruel”, for example, sounds like it was played on her Bobcat Harmony through a waterlogged amp. In an interview with Matt Sweeney, she described her guitar tone as “angst or anger,” and it’s easy to see where she’s coming from: she makes it sound frustrated and upset, like it’s lashing out at the listener.
I’d argue she’s one of the most exciting guitar players in music right now. Just watch this clip of her playing “Northern Lights” on Jools Holland a few years back: she lurches between fuzzy riffing and banging on open strings. And her solo, at about 1:45, is a wild mix of the two. It’s a jaw dropping performance, easily besting any guitar pyrotechnics that Derek Miller’s ever come up with.
And musically, that’s what’s most striking about “Digital Witness” to me: there’s a utter lack of guitars on the track. Instead, it’s covered in horns and keyboards. While it reminds me a lot of her work with David Byrne, it’s not that far removed from songs like “Marrow” either. And while I can hear a little guitar in the background her playing is never the focus; in fact, after I watched the video a few times, I realized she never touches any instrument in the video.
And that’s what makes this one spookier than her past work. She’s in some post-industrial landscape, either stuck in windowless rooms or on a Martian landscape, devoid of any kind of life, human or musical.
The Orphan Master’s Son largely follows a nameless orphan who works for a nameless branch of the NK government, kidnapping Japanese citizens and shipping them back to Pyongyang. In the novel, that city takes on a colourless, dull existence: half-completed buildings, nothing more than husks, where stray dogs roam around on the roof and the government is always broadcasting, telling you what to think, what to feel. Soon it devolves into paranoia, torture, and questioning of identity.
It feels the same in St. Vincent’s song. As a group of uniformed people march in lockstep, she stands in the corner and sings lines like “I want all of your mind,” or “this is no time for confessing.”
There’s a vaguely militaristic feel to “Digital Witness”. Everyone, but her wears a uniform, their hair slicked back and moves mechanically. She’s removed from them all: not only is she the only one wearing a dress, but her hair’s standing up like Don King’s, looking like an uncontrolled mass. Unlike everyone else, she smiles, jerks around. Basically, she’s the only individual there. And she’s the one they all stare at, the one shuffled off to the corner of the room, standing out from the pack.
Part of me wants to take the easy road and say this is a song about alienation in the digital age, about the barriers we put up around ourselves: Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, etc. But I’m not completely sure that’s what she’s going for here. Between the lines about dreaming, the way the video slowly goes from sunlight to darkness and the odd, repetitive motions, it’s hinting at something I’m not quite grasping yet.
But then, the album is still on the horizon, set for release at the end of the month. All we’ve seen from it is a cover, this video and another tune (“Birth in Reverse”). It’s still way too early to make any real judgments on it yet. Still, the early evidence has this being a departure from her earlier records. It’s easily the LP I’m looking forward to the most this year.