Just in time for those year-end lists to pupate, it’s Critically Acclaimed Wednesday! Of course, we are large and contain curmudgeons…
[Video][Website]
[6.25]
Iain Mew: Some album openers ease in slowly, and some are grand new statements, but a lot are restatements of purpose: setting up all the familiar elements as a prelude to interesting new variations. “Rattlesnake” is one of those, immediately and pleasingly recognisable St. Vincent, and it works great as an album opener — but a bit less so as a single.
[6]
Dan MacRae: I always feel guilty listening to St. Vincent because most of the time I admire her creations more than I genuinely enjoy them. (That’s probably a factory defect on my end.) “Rattlesnake” is a much more enticing proposition for this goober, though. It has this quicksand labyrinth thump-n-weave quality that speaks to me and my interests.
[7]
Alfred Soto: Listening to the synth bass farts and St’s harmonizing wordlessly with herself and the guitar rubbing itself in the dirt, I’m ready to retract the polite yawn I gave the eponymous album in February. I mean, who else is feeding Poly Styrene into Brian Eno’s Roxy keyboards like she is? No one will ever find her, she vows.
[8]
Scott Mildenhall: Pretending to lead into Jennifer Lopez’s “Play” is a cruel trick, but disappointment fades. The jagged burble becomes an asset — a glitch in the map endlessly eking its way around, lightly fizzy, lightly dizzying. When the time comes for a sight amid the landscape there may have been better choices than distorted electric guitar, though.
[6]
Anthony Easton: This should be more dangerous, or bleaker, or more about the desert, or sinuous, or anything but St. Vincent’s vocals abstracted against the same blank scrim.
[4]
Will Adams: Clark’s stuttered screeches begin to grate after the second chorus, just in time for the lead guitar to raze everything in its path for the final act. Stilted and angular, “Rattlesnake” provides a confident introduction to St. Vincent, but on its own is just a bit too left of center.
[5]
Micha Cavaseno: The “unfunky” is weird territory for me. It’s cheap to blame Annie’s dalliance in this style on her brief tenure with David Byrne, but given the man’s illustrious career in the herky-jerky it’s not unfair. Solo’s nice, and it’s weird to hear a chorus that doesn’t MEAN to sound like a cross between Thom Yorke and Lionel Richie on “All Night Long”. But while St. Vincent S/T’s dalliance with the sonically neurotic might be thematic, it’s exhausting to put up with, the “can’t dance too hard cause then you might think we’re having too much fun because there’s no fun here!” of it all.
[5]
Juana Giaimo: Once again St. Vincent performs a character — a neurotic and robotic woman tired of life — that I can’t believe anymore. In the album, “Rattlesnake” is a highlight because it’s less messy than the rest of the tracklist, but as a single it fails. Although its beginning is mysterious and exciting, the chorus leaves a certain void that the final solo guitar can’t fill.
[5]
W.B. Swygart: Super-regimented neurosis jams 4 life, innit. A heaving hurdy-gurdy that she can’t turn off whams away in the background, as her voice gets spillier and spillier, til finally the vein bursts and there’s fuzz everywhere. It’s nice when lunacies chime.
[8]
Brad Shoup: I feel like I’m buried in the pit where they stuck all those E.T. games, but this is twitchy and playful, stocked with the stutter she’s been enjoying of late. If I grab onto the flanged hi-hat I might survive the feeling.
[7]
Megan Harrington: St. Vincent songs are so florid and idiosyncratic that I don’t have the attention span necessary to keep up. Most of “Rattlesnake” whizzes past my head, existing in dimensions I don’t. Without fail, the experience snaps into focus when Clark’s guitar solo bursts through the Rococo window dressing. She is Robert Fripp to St. Vincent’s Brian Eno. Her guitar work fights to exist; it’s shrill, screeching and white hot.
[8]
Katherine St Asaph: Clark has great weird fun with sounds both obvious (rattly percussion shakes, distorted guitar heroism) and less so (sudden processed octave jumps, what sounds like drumming on the innards of an Amiga), but “Rattlesnake” remains a trifle due to what I’ll call the Battles About Oatmeal Are Never Gonna Be Historic Principle: ultimately this is sorta just a song about not being killed by a snake.
[6]