St. Vincent’s seventh album is her first ever to feel like an exhale, as the patently ambitious songwriter shrewdly forgoes much of the brazen — and regularly challenging — synth-rock spectacles of muses David Bowie and David Byrne. Instead, she’s settled in with the grit and shabby-chic glamor of early ‘70s Manhattan: heels on the subway, bodega roses, threats of love, violence and disillusion around every corner.
Scenes from the city fuel the album’s lived-in and retro-tinged aesthetic, as do the sounds that dominated the periods’ airwaves, wedged between The Beatles and Sex Pistols: soul, soft-rock and psychedelia (plus a shitload of moody organs).
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