St. Vincent wrapped up her critically lauded orchestral tour run in her “adopted hometown” of Los Angeles at the Hollywood Bowl Sunday night, enlisting the venue’s famed orchestra to help turn her discography into a full-on theatrical experience.
The concert marked the culmination of a concept years in the making, starting with when the singer-songwriter — real name Anne Clark — was first invited last year for BBC Proms, where she collaborated with conductor Jules Buckley for a concert at Royal Albert Hall. That resulted in St. Vincent’s latest album, Live in London!, which dropped in March, and a now-completed two-month trek that had her and Buckley playing with local symphony orchestras all over the country from Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Boston, New York and Detroit, among many more.
Still, the Hollywood Bowl is the only locale appropriate to wrap up something as cinematic as this, and Clark delivered, bringing an hour-and-a-half set that flew by as she added yet another layer to her already genre-bending mix of art-rock and pop.
The orchestral accompaniment lends itself well to St. Vincent’s music, adding a certain dramatic flair to an already very visual discography. The strings help bring out the Bond Theme quality of “Violent Times.” “Smoking Section” gets a bit more grandiose and takes on an almost Spaghetti Western vibe, while “Los Ageless” gets scaled back, going much more intimate from its hardened industrial rock, with swelling strings and piano emphasizing the longing in the song’s chorus: “how could anybody have you and lose you and not lose their minds, too?”
And while an orchestra of dozens of players can make it harder for any one instrument to stand out, it only further emphasized Clark’s inventive guitar work, adding a Zeppelin-esque light and shade quality where her heavily distorted six-string could suddenly cut through the daintier score, only to disappear again as she went back to a verse.
She emphasized the drama with her own physical performance too. During show opener “We Put a Pearl in the Ground,” she held her arm out, fingers crossed for much of the track. On “Marrow,” she hits the body of her guitar like she’s thumping her chest as she spells “H-E-L-P.” And during “The Bed,” she kept her fingers on the vein on her left arm by the pit of her elbow, as if to check her pulse.
For an Orchestra-backed show, Clark was never above getting loose. Toward the end of the set during “New York,” Clark had taken to the edge of the stage, walking just above the concert-goers in the pool circle section, grabbing someone’s popcorn and pouring it all over herself. She reached for another before pulling back. “The popcorn bit only works once,” she said, soon after grabbing someone’s glass of wine and splashing that all over her chest and waist as well.
As she’s done throughout much of the tour, she wrapped up her set with the fitting, string-laden Masseduction standout “Slow Disco.”
Setlist:
“We Put a Pearl in the Ground”
“Hell Is Near”
“Reckless”
“Violent Times”
“Black Rainbow”
“Marrow”
“The Bed”
“Smoking Section”
“Now, Now”
“Live in the Dream”
“The Nowhere Inn”
“Digital Witness”
“Los Ageless”
“New York”
“Paris Is Burning”
Encore:
“Slow Disco”