St. Vincent delivers a one-woman 'Masseduction' in St. Paul

St. Vincent's tour stop Saturday at the Palace Theatre was the concert equivalent of a bright butterfly emerging from a dark cocoon. It started out confined and colorless but gradually took flight with an increasingly radiant and bustling stage show.

Dallas-bred art-rocker Annie Clark — she's recorded as St. Vincent since 2007, after stints playing with Sufjan Stevens and the Polyphonic Spree — always puts on a one-of-a-kind performance, but her sold-out, 90-minute St. Paul set was otherworldly.

For starters, she had no band. She sang and played guitar to prerecorded backing tracks throughout the show. The solo configuration took some getting used to Saturday.

The lack of backup musicians was our first clue Clark was up to something different. Another big hint was the outfit she wore as the stage curtain opened just enough in the opener "Marry Me" to reveal her patent-leather, hot-pink leotard and matching thigh-high boots. It looked like the most uncomfortable get-up worn on a local stage since the last Genitorturers show in town.

Clark wore it boldly and nonchalantly, though, as the curtain opened more and more while the coloring turned brighter through a string of older tunes, including an industrial-sounding "Actor Out of Work" and an especially high-wired "Cruel."

That pink-plasmatic outfit and a lot of the video imagery that would later fill the backdrop video screen fit the sexually robotic tone of the new St. Vincent album, "Masseduction," which she performed almost in its entirety for the last half of the concert.

Following a change into a silvery, sci-fi-looking mini-dress, she stood atop a raised mini-stage for the night's most dramatic vocal moment, "Hang on Me" — proof there was a golden voice under all the visual veneer. Then came evidence of her unique guitar mastery as she tore through an extra-gnarly solo in "Pills."

"I can't turn off what turns me on," Clark sang in the new album's title track, one of several sendups of sexuality in the digital age. She paid homage to Mr. Sexuality himself, Prince, by recounting how her tour manager informed her of his presence just before she took the stage her last time in town.

"Why on God's green Earth would you tell me that?" was her nerve-wracked reaction.

Clark should have given a shout-out to another Twin Cities legend: filmmaker Chuck Statler, whose innovative work on Devo's music videos was copied throughout the "Masseduction" set, from imagery of women wrapped in gauze to a phone made out of cake.

Like Devo, Clark's performance art would have rung hollow without straight-up good songs. Even with all the pizazz and without a band behind her, the most impressive thing about Saturday's gig remained Clark's strong knack for musical seduction.

Chris Riemenschneider • 612-673-4658

@ChrisRstrib