come sit right here and sleep while i slip poison in your ear

On her debut, St. Vincent (aka Annie Clark) bends and melds genres, delivers her  lyrics in a beautiful mezzo-soprano, and injects quirk and wit with more than just the words coming out of her mouth.

Featuring no fewer than 24 individual instruments (perhaps a nod to her other project, the Polyphonic Spree?), St. Vincent’s music is a luxuriant canopy of sound that refrains from becoming cloying. “Jesus Saves, I Spend” incorporates what may be middle-eastern influences, while “Paris is Burning” descends into a manic waltz.

“Your Lips Are Red” is a weird tune whose urgency boils under the surface, and the children’s choir on the excellent “Now, Now” gives the track a quirky punch.

Not to be overlooked are the record’s lyrics. Novel and intelligent, Clark does everything from referencing Shakespeare (“Juliet, how you been? / you look like death…” as well as the lyrics that are the title of this post) to giving everyday feelings like love and doubt a cinematic tilt (“I’m crawling through landmines / just to feel where you’ve been / I’m crawling through landmines / I know ’cause I planted them”).

Truly a masterful debut, you can find out more about St. Vincent here.

—

Marry Me dropped on 07/10/2007.

Disclaimer: In order to defend our hipster cred / cool points, we’d like to note that we requested this album for review on June 4. After receiving an incomplete digital copy, we finally received the real thing. Yesterday. We’ll just call it a St. Vincent summer.