Wow. St. Vincent. Annie. Clark. You had me at the sound of your guitar doing wild and crazy things. A little over a year ago I heard these whispers that St. Vincent was pretty good at playing the guitar. Then I heard a passerby say impressive. She must have heard the same because her newest album is heavy on what she can do when it's just her and an electric guitar. Yes there's a band, but what she does is at the forefront.  On stage, sitting from afar, I only caught a glimpse of her stage presence. A lithe singer/songwriter one my guess at first glance, but looking a bit closer you see a strength. A thin arm is suddenly more, a shadowy bicep with definition appears. And there's the power stance that's all her own. A stance that tells you she's about to do something nasty with that guitar of hers.

Here's a clip of her guitar solo on the song Surgeon. Halfway through she's shaking her head but more so in agreement or approval with what the guitar is doing I suppose. 

Here's what Pitchfork had to say about her newest album.
            
"And anyone who's seen the Berklee dropout do her seizured duckwalk in concert while soloing on unhinged tracks like "Your Lips Are Red" knows her not-so-secret weapon is a lurching guitar style somewhere between Robert Fripp's sheet-metal prog and Tom Morello's 10-ton riffage. On Strange Mercy, she ditches Marry Me's naivety and Actor's ostentatious arrangements, boosts the inventive guitar playing, and ends up with her most potent and cathartic release yet."

At different points during the show I was both in awe and disbelief. I had seen her once before but this time it was more in-your-face and brutal. A good brutal and in-your-face. As I walked out of the show one thought was constant. I've got to get me an electric guitar. I've got to at least attempt to make sounds like the ones I heard throughout the night. Oh and that Annie Clark is a bad, bad guitar player.

169 and North Oak.

I'd like to call moments like this one I'm about to describe as Twin Peaks-ish or Lynchian (David). It's sort of like the bizarre or macabre that surfaces in the normal everyday life of average, everyday people. Here's a good quote that summarizes this Lynchian idea.

“An academic definition of Lynchian might be that the term “refers to a particular kind of irony where the very macabre and the very mundane combine in such a way as to reveal the former’s perpetual containment within the latter.”

And so it was last evening as I made my nightly drive home from work that my car notified me that I was low on fuel and that I would need to make a stop at a gas station. I pull into a random place that I rarely go to and I can't even remember the name of the place. On that note, I did pass a gas station on the way to Parkville called Please Stop. Probably the most politely named placed I've ever seen, but it also makes me think that the place is in trouble and they're begging passing drivers to stop.

And so I get out of my car and go through my normal routine where I touch something metal on my car to discharge the static electricity that I have built up over the day, undo the gas cap, insert and quickly remove my credit card, select the gas, wait no go back, select against receiving a receipt and car wash, lift up the pump, then select gas, put pump in car and finally look around parking lot as car is being filled.

To my left a teenager is getting out of his SUV parked near the street, while a female passenger sits. Closer, another teenager with a lanyard hanging across his neck and over his back is cleaning his windshield. To my right an older man with white hair and dressed in a suit minus the jacket is cleaning his rear windshield. No big deal. Normal, everyday stuff.

A second later I look around and the SUV teenager is pacing back in the street looking for something. Something must have fell out in the road while he was driving. The lanyard teenager is still cleaning is windshield. Hasn't this gone on for a little too long, I think. When was the last time I cleaned my windshield? I can't remember. It's not something I particularly think to do unless it's very much necessary. To my right the old gentleman is using that cleaning brush on his bumper. Huh? That's kinda strange I think. I don't realize it at the time, how strange this all is, but I keep watching the man in the tie and white shirt with sleeves rolled up. He's washing his bumper and license plate. He's going over the rear brake lights. I hadn't seen that before, I say to myself. I look over and the teenager is running across the street looking on the other side of the fairly busy highway. The other teenager is done washing his windshield as I hear his wipers drop and hit the glass.  That's normal, I think, I've seen that before. I look back to the old man he's going over the roof of his car now. What could he possibly be doing that for? Dust? Back to the teenager with the clean windshield. He's not done, but I thought I heard the windshield wipers hit. He's methodically going over the corners of the glass and getting the last streams of water. He's being very careful as he glides the squeegee over the glass. Back to the old man. Still going over his entire car. Back to the young man. Now going over the roof of his car. Back to the kid who is now walking back to the SUV, still not sure what he was looking for and it doesn't look like he found it. I stop when the gas reaches $10 dollars. I feel like I'm in a weird twilight episode. Something is just not quite right. I leave the gas station in a haste. I don't look back but I imagine you middle aged business man has moved on to his hood and front license plate and the teenager with the lanyard has moved down to where water has dripped on to the tires and is going over the curves with the squeegee. Maybe it's not weird. Maybe it's perfectly normal. And I suppose it is perfectly normal for people to combine the very macabre with the very mundane act of filling up your car with gas and cleaning the windows.