Tomorrow Is Some Kind Of Stranger

St. Vincent “The Neighbors”

Annie Clark tends to deliver her vocal parts with a calm, steady tone that makes even her most anxious lyrics come across as extraordinarily lucid, but as she sings the emotional climax of “The Neighbors,” her voice trembles a tiny bit, indicating great stress and strain in the slightest inflection.

“How can Monday be alright, and then on Tuesday lose my mind?”

She sounds genuinely exasperated by her emotional instability, in the way that only someone who identifies as a solid, well-adjusted person can be. The composition mirrors that tension when its gorgeous melody and airy string arrangement crash into a heavily processed guitar part that synthesizes a hundred shades of angst and frustration into a concentrated yet strangely muted gut-punch of sound. In context, it seems like deeply repressed negativity coming up to the surface, but still remaining just barely under control.

Buy it from Amazon. You can find my review of this album on Pitchfork here.

Phantom/Ghost “Ornithology”

I suppose this song just had to be about birds in some way, or at the very least, some other thing that flies through the air. Birds make the most sense, though — beautiful, not particularly menacing, and small enough to have a measure of grace. The prepared piano in this piece has an incredibly lovely tone, especially when they hit these bright notes that seem to sparkle for just moment as the key is struck. It all comes together to create this strange vision of my mind of small birds darting through the sky, but rather than being made of flesh and bone and feathers, the birds are brief flickers of colorful light, like fireworks.

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