on life, music etc beyond mainstream
„Daddy’s Home from St. Vincent is the perfect amalgamation of warm, 70s funk layered beneath unique and ever-inventive pop production. Harsh realities may have inspired the record but supreme musicianship and cleverly written tracks are what hold it all together.“
Jamie Parmenter, Editor and Founder of Vinyl Chapters. („Always bothering people to tell a story about a record in their vinyl collection“)
Jamie, thank you, this will be a new series! 😅
There are a lot of trapped people on this record, whether that is the incarcerated (the jelly-legged cabaret of the title track addresses her father’s jail time head-on), or those wanting to flee from a relationship (“You make a home I run away and the story starts again,” she sings on “My Baby Wants A Baby”), or the caged bird of “Candy Darling”. Others still explore all the ways we try to set ourselves free: pharmaceuticals, liquor, crashed cars, bodega roses, suicidal ideation. The result is something close, dark and airless.
And yet there is a deep and buoyant beauty here too: the combination of Clark’s voice, feathered and sweet, against surges of brass on “…At The Holiday Party”, for instance. The drowsy, inebriated drift of “Live In The Dream”. And throughout, the warm, buffering presence of Fiddmont and Hathaway. On previous records, Clark’s tales were told in a manner that was brittle and upright and shiny; here she sounds to have loosened her grip: the edges are softer, the layers are denser, the mood a little more mañana.
FROM UNCUT