Not everyone has the courage to release the same album in a different way (in fact, maybe the closest excuse a musician ever got was turning their best-loved singles acoustic for MTV Unplugged). St. Vincent, unfortunately, had just the chutzpah to feel inclined to do so with the flipside to 2017’s MASSEDUCTION, MassEducation. Sure, it might have been one thing to play with the iterations of “Slow Disco” (as further evidence that the artist is constantly seeking perfection in their work where they can’t get it in life), but to feel inclined to tamper with the entire fabric of all the gloriousness that is MASSEDUCTION proves utterly futile when listening to a record that feels more neo-Jewel than St. Vincent.
As a means to help further distinguish the reworked tracks from those on MASSEDUCTION, St. Vincent jumbles the order in starting with her pièce de résistance, “Slow Slow Disco.” From there, things continue “well enough” with “Savior”–that is until her voice becomes more grating than soothing with, “Please” chanted over and over again. As in “please” do not continue any further down this path of destroying your own work. But continue she must, with the title track (once upon a time), “Masseduction.” In its original form, it is a sweltering, frenetic indication of just how much she doesn’t want you to turn off what turns her on. Which is why it’s strange that she should feel inclined to do just that to you in releasing this album as a boner killer companion piece to the original.
“Sugarboy,” too, is rendered flaccid and unrecognizable, oozing desperation as opposed to sex as St. Vincent wails, “Sugarboy, I’m in need/How I wish for somethin’ sweet/Sugarboy, I am weak/Got a crush on tragedy.” This much is evident as she persists in eviscerating her pristine record with “Fear the Future,” which, at first, has a somewhat inviting Regina Spektor feel as she keeps her voice and piano movements controlled until “I feel the future” is caterwauled with no real conviction behind it.
Reigning her vocals in for “Smoking Section,” we’re again lulled into a false sense of security in terms of briefly thinking, “Oh, this is kind of pleasant,” until St. V lays a little too heavily on the vowel in “end”–i.e., “It’s not the end.” This is, sorry to say, the case for the album not being over as she segues next into “Los Ageless,” a song that maintains the majority of its skeleton, along with “New York,” already prone as it was to an acoustic, morose bent (just like the city itself, most of the time, and especially with the impending winter).
Faint tolerability persists with “Young Lover,” as St. Vincent showcases her vocal talent in a way that doesn’t end up turning almost instantly abrasive. Oh wait, then she starts oohing like a ghost in pained heat, thereby negating all aforementioned tolerability. She starts anew into the carefully constrained vocals we have, at this point, been so falsely led into believing would remain for the duration of a song on “Happy Birthday, Johnny,” one of the most markedly piano-oriented offerings. Except, this time around, she isn’t teasing us–she really does keep her voice in a pitch that doesn’t turn into some sort of esoteric mating call that could only possibly appeal to one of the same species (and not the human one).
The most egregious maiming on MassEducation might be “Pills,” a magical electro-inspired, Jack Antonoff-produced homage to all the many substances we need just to wake, sleep, eat and fuck. In its stripped down incarnation, it does, in fact, make you want to take many pills so as to black out and not hear it any longer. Ending with the song that begins MASSEDUCTION, “Hang On Me,” St. Vincent is calm once more–so prone to these vocal peaks and valleys of extreme emotion. Missing the visceral moodiness of the real “Hang On Me”–in truth, this is the fault that lies in each of these songs, and is often the overall risk when anyone goes the “stripped down” route–we are left wanting to do anything but hang on to this unpalatable reimagining. Very obviously recorded in the short span of two days while mixing was being done for MASSEDUCTION, noticeably absent from the album is “Dancing With A Ghost,” an uber-ethereal forty-six second instrumental version of “Slow Disco.” But who needs it on MassEducation when we’re already trying our best to dance with the ghost of a once unbesmirchable record, now tainted with these auditory assaults on perfection.
Combining the worst and most vexing qualities of Fiona Apple and Alanis Morissette’s work, St. Vincent educates on nothing other than the fact that sometimes it’s best to just start from scratch when one wants to put out new work (or simply leave experiments behind closed doors). Call it “avant-garde” or “bold” all you want, but there was more heroism and daring to MASSEDUCTION for its sheer listenability. Because evidently one has to go against the curve to make anything resembling music that isn’t tantamount to cochlear rape in the twenty-first century.
