Leading her band St. Vincent at a sold out Vic Friday night, Annie Clark spent much of her time on stage nearly stock still, a porcelain statue dressed in black, but it didn’t take long to recognize the stationary pose as a sneaky ruse. As soon as a song called for it, she’d quickly shuffle back on her teetering high heels and strangle her guitar with an almost pathological intensity, squeezing from it some of the ugliest, dirtiest, coolest fuzz tones imaginable. Needless to say, Clark’s songs called for it a lot.
An extremely gifted musician with an ear for idiosyncratic compositions, Clark continues to evolve as a songwriter and performer, with her band evolving alongside her. This evening Clark fronted a modest if unconventional four piece, with her guitar the sole stringed instrument and its overwhelming personality augmented by two synth players and a drummer, each adeptly recreating the abrasive sounds and jittery rhythms that mark St. Vincent and especially the group’s third album, “Strange Mercy,” which provided the bulk of the night’s material.
But of course, all eyes remained on Clark, a curious figure whose gentle demeanor and sweet voice are belied by the demonic forces that possess her when she cuts loose on her instrument of choice. “Black Rainbow” and “Northern Lights” in particular provided ample room to make a racket, though Clark was just as capable of weaving her distinctive stun-gun leads in and around the melodies of songs such as “Actor Out of Work” and “Cruel,” to name two of her more immediate songs. Admittedly, the tight structure of the arrangements didn’t leave much space for soloing, but the constraints imposed by the music encouraged Clark to efficiently make the most of every noise-making opportunity.
Besides, Clark had plenty of chances to work more spontaneously with her cover of the Pop Group’s infamously agitated “She is Beyond Good and Evil,” a skronky post-punk paean to discord that Clark embraced with gusto, carrying the aggression into a rousing version of her own “Krokodil.” She began the song hoisted aloft on the shoulders of a game security guy and ended it up tumbling across the crowd, tossed heels over head as the band pounded away back on stage. Following such a fun, chaotic display of punk zeal, St. Vincent’s radically rearranged encore of “Your Lips Are Red” seemed almost anticlimactic, an attempt to squeeze lighting back into an easier to control bottle even as the charge she’d generated earlier continued to resonate and spark.