Review: Guitar goddess St. Vincent gets human in St. Paul

St. Vincent stood onstage in an archway, backlit amid stage fog. Strike a pose. A vision in black-and-white like an old Hollywood movie star. Raven hair and matching black jacket and shorts. Eventually she strapped on a series of guitars of distinctive geometric shape and let her hair down.

St. Vincent, the arty guitar goddess, came across as a down-to-earth rock star on Thursday night at the Palace Theatre in St. Paul, showing more personality than she has in previous Twin Cities concerts.

Where were the colorful costumes? The choreographed movements? The artsy accoutrements of previous tours?

St. Vincent, 41, may be rock music’s most artful shapeshifter of the past 15 years or so. Like Bowie, Prince and Madonna, St. Vincent changes her sound and look/visuals with each album and its affiliated tour. Her concerts tend to be as high concept as her albums.

For instance, for the trek behind 2021′s “Daddy’s Home,” she became a blond ‘70s glamour puss fronting a vintage soul music revue. In 2017, for her Masseduction Tour, she emerged in a pink plasmatic outfit and played the entire concert without a band, relying on recorded tracks. In 2014, she was a sexy robot with a silver, cotton-candy bouffant of hair, relishing the mechanical minimalism for her performance.

On Thursday, on the opening of her two-night St. Paul stand (Friday is sold out), St. Vincent opted for a minimalist production — three movable arches, a stylish light show and three small video screens behind her for clips or live close-ups. Backed by four musicians, she showcased her different voices from menacing screamer to jazzy balladeer and shredded on guitar (though not as much as on some previous tours). But what made this oddly flowing but potent show special was that St. Vincent often shed her artiste persona and became more personal.

It wasn’t just telling the story about Prince showing up at one of her shows in New York City and she being terrified eyeing him sitting in the royal box, it was that she engaged with the audience more. During the song “New York,” she jumped into the pit in front of the stage on the shoulders of a security guard. And she eventually hopped the barrier and made her way into the densely packed crowd, greeting fans and eventually joking, “I’m looking for the bathroom. Do you guys know where it is?”

When it was time to return to the stage, she couldn’t quite figure out how to gracefully do it — should the security guard lift her? should she head backstage? — oh, she just used her instincts and kind of crawled back by herself.

Despite her occasional dramatic poses and skittering robotic movements, St. Vincent came across as human. In her generous conversation, she talked about not wanting to start a civil war between Minneapolis, where she has appeared many times, and St. Paul, where she was performing this week.

She reminisced about playing at the 7th Street Entry for her first two times in the Twin Cities. She didn’t mention gigs at the Fine Line (opening for the National) as well as Walker Art Center and Cedar Cultural Center and even sharing the Orpheum stage with David Byrne in 2012.

In 2006, after playing guitar with the Polyphonic Spree and Sufjan Stevens, the Oklahoma-born, Dallas-bred Annie Clark launched a solo career as St. Vincent. She has earned consistent critical hosannas and three Grammys, including for best alternative album in 2022 for “Daddy’s Home.”

This year’s mournful “All Born Screaming,” her seventh studio album and most personal effort, was the focus of Thursday’s show. St. Vincent opened motionlessly with the slow yet riveting “Reckless” — “I’ll tear you limb from limb or I’ll fall in love” — before it exploded into noisy dissonance and blinding white lights. During “Sweetest Fruit,” a song about loss, she fired off a speedy guitar solo with some whammy bar action. “Broken Man” — “On the street, I’m a king-sized killer/I can make your kingdom come” — was all electro-shocked chaos. The album’s low-key title track was the night’s penultimate selection, a declamation of hope that dissolved into restful, repetitive choral chant.

St. Vincent closed the evening — she dubbed her encore a “pageantry of narcissism” because she’d just donned a tour T-shirt — sitting on the edge of the stage, accompanied only by Rachel Eckroth’s piano. Looking like she was no longer ready for her Hollywood close-up, the exhausted singer with the slightly raspy voice delivered the plaintive “Somebody Like Me,” a deeply personal ballad in which she wonders is it — love, life or whatever — worth it.

Opening the concert was theatrical Houston electro-pop artist Dorian Electra, who crammed 18 songs into 45 minutes while St. Vincent offered a similar number in 100 minutes.