St. Vincent with Foreign Born

Music Starts:02/22/2008 - 8:00pm

St. VincentAnother smash double-bill, and a tremendous opportunity to catch St Vincent performing with a full band, and the Current(ly) popular Foreign Born. St. Vincent is Annie Clark, born in Tulsa, OK, the middle child of nine brothers and sisters. While most little girls were still playing with dolls, Annie preferred crafting homespun guitars from cardboard and rubber bands. By the time she was twelve, she had moved on to the real thing and fallen quickly in love. Growing up in Bible-belted Texas, Clark found music by means of Coltrane records, found people by means of Tennessee Williams plays, and found philosophy by means of her Catholic, Jewish, Unitarian, and Meher Baba-loving family. All of this finds its way, with smirks and reverence, into her music. St. Vincent makes cinematic pop epics that feel at times like Paris in the ’20s before all the fun ended. Or, conversely, an orchestra of pure modernity—a new American music, informed by jazz, gospel blues, Southern folk music, and classical composition but—in the end—an animal original unto itself.
St Vincent's debut album Marry Me (Beggars Banquet) showcases her clever lyrics which can be weird or tongue-in-cheek or dead serious, capturing what it feels like to be 24 years old in America and caught up in the delirium of love blues and wartime blues and the various swashbuckling adventures of existence. Horns and strings cry out brassy and full-bodied over digital keyboards. Songs rock out vigorously, break down into squiggling post-noise-rock deconstructions, roll out mellow and slow-flowing as a river. Backing harmonies and kiddie choirs loom in the distance, rise, and lilt above the stately grandiosity.

Hailed by the Boston Globe as an, 'adorably spunky guitar prodigy,' Annie is an inventive and versatile guitarist, and has played with avant-garde composer, Glenn Branca, and is a member of symphonic pop spectacle, The Polyphonic Spree. Definitely a new artist to watch, and see now while she can still be contained in an intimate venue!

Foreign Born's dark, acoustic, psychedelic music claims a mixture of influences ranging from Roy Orbison and John Lennon to the Fall, Primal Scream, Jesus & Mary Chain and Brian Eno. Guitarist Lewis Pesacov's formal education keeps the compositions tight and strongly constructed, while singer Matt Popieluch tends to do quite the opposite, with winning results. Although it is usually Matt and Lewis who come up with the songs' foundations, bassist Ariel Rechtshaid and drummer Garrett Ray play an equally important role in shaping the songs' structure and arrangement. Foreign Born have found themselves on the road at home and abroad with We Are Scientists, Giant Drag, Rogue Wave and the Cold War Kids. For both of their tours in the fall of 2006, they navigated the US and Canada in a borrowed van powered by vegetable oil, finding their fuel behind the nation's finer roadside dining establishments. At home they've shared bills with The Futureheads, The Walkmen, and Grizzly Bear, whose guitarist Ed Droste called Foreign Born his "favorite new band" in a recent Pitchfork feature.