Let This Colony Know

St. Vincent @ The National, Richmond VA (5/24/12)

I don’t know about the rest of LTCK but I can for sure say this is one of the best shows I’ve seen all year and maybe even the greater part of last year too.

Let’s start with the opener Shearwater, who is a well-received band in their own right. Featuring ex-members of the folky Okkervil River, they’re no strangers on how to make a good music. The sound vibes we got from Shearwater was a mix of The National with Arcade Fire, so there was no way they could really go wrong there. Me and Trey were impressed by their democratic stage approach, as the members rotated on both instrumental and vocal duties.

Then it was time for St. Vincent, aka. Annie Clark. Annie, being a member of Sufjan Stevens’ touring band for awhile, is also no stranger to making good music. I think it’s akin to working at Apple for a while and then starting your own tech company - you’ll know what you’re doing. Anyway, with Annie on guitar, she is rounded out by a drummer, an Asian gal on a mini Moog synth, and a keyboardist. Soundwise, Annie’s vocals and guitar are slightly more pronounced than anything else (which is a good thing) but overall I would say the rest of the sounds are pretty evenly mixed. To me, how well everything is mixed is half of the battle of a good show: too often I go to shows where the instruments drown out the vocals pretty badly and things end up sounding unintentionally shoegaze…but I digress again.

St. Vincent opened up with “Marrow” which is the liveliest song from Actor and that got the crowd moving right away. It also put on perfect display what Vincent is known for: guitar freakouts. I hate calling it that, but that’s exactly what they are. The whole night during every song she would bust out some serious guitar licks, dancing around the stage all jittery like she was Elvis or something.

“Surgeon” was the obvious highlight of the night. Even if you’ve heard this song a million times on record, it doesn’t hold a candle to seeing it performed live. Basically, every second of this song is like magic - it’s that perfect. There are tons of transitions, making it sound like four different songs at once but they all come together to make one enjoyable, complete song. And that transition into the ending of the song is too good for words. Nothing was more phenomenal than the ending to “Black Rainbow” though, which just ascends and ascends for like a minute straight - it was so epic, it definitely felt like the world was on the edge of doomsday.

Her crowd interaction was top notch. The between-song banter was slightly above your generic “Thank you so much (insert city here)” and she tried to make it a little more personal, namedropping the places she’s played in town previously, and talking about her day in the library near The National. She also told some charming jokes with her awkward but spot-on sense of comedic timing. During “Krokodil” she crowd surfed through the entire song like she’s been doing ever since she first started playing it live which was a lot of fun to be a part of, and provided some great photo opportunities as well (I don’t have any photos but I’m sure lots of them will be floating around out there).

The main set was comprised of almost all of Strange Mercy and a few cuts from Actor here and there. She encored with the title cut from Strange Mercy and then my favorite from Marry Me, “Your Lips are Red.” I wish there was a little more of Actor and Marry Me represented but I was more than stoked on what was played. Hands down, I can say St. Vincent really raised the bar on which I will grade future live shows.

10/10