St. Vincent at Kaserne Basel - 9 November 2014

To begin with a misquote from Star Trek: it's pop, but not as we know it. Avant-garde musician St. Vincent proved her uniqueness at the Kaserne Basel with a show that was one part performance art, two parts music. Kicking off with the clattering trio of Rattlesnake, Digital Witness and Cruel, St. Vincent took the audience through a rollarcoaster of genres, fusing metal with funk, electro with rock, pop with noise music.

The stage was spare, with just a staired pedestal as a prop to climb up or lay down on. An ideal backdrop for the theatricality of St. Vincent's performance - the robot-like moves, the guitar shredding, the headbanging, the anecdotes between songs. Her accompanying musician Toko Yasuda would occasionally join her in the choreography, while keyboarder Daniel Mintseris ("tamer of ones and zeros") and drummer Matt Johnson ("the Frank Gehry of drumming") provided clarity and precision in equal measures.

St. Vincent's voice soared and shone (especially on Prince Johnny), howled and growled. Now and then, she sounded like The Knife's Karin Dreijer Andersson, an equally arresting presence on the music scene.

Some of her songs were cool and abstract (Chloe In The Afternoon), some genuinely thrilling (Birth In Reverse), some weird (for example Surgeon, which started as muzak and then turned into a beast of a tune). It wouldn't make for a comfortable listening experience at home, but in a live setting, the stranger the music became, the better it was.

Clearly, St. Vincent's music was not for everyone, as demonstrated by the few people who left the venue early. But for those who stayed, the rewards were plenty. The epic ten-minute Your Lips Are Red closed the set, with the singer clambering onto a security man's shoulders and ripping into her guitar like a woman possessed.

As the house lights came up, the outro was, fittingly enough, Erik Satie's Gnossienne No. 1: an at-the-time experimental piece of music which expanded sonic horizons, much as St. Vincent's music does now.

Setlist:

Rattlesnake

Digital Witness

Cruel

Marrow

Every Tear Disappears

Chloe In The Afternoon

I Prefer Your Love

Actor Our Of Work

Surgeon

Cheerleader

Prince Johnny

Birth In Reverse

Regret

Huey Newton

Bring Me Your Loves

Severed Crossed Fingers

Your Lips Are Red

(Source: setlist.fm)

- Anna Wirz

More photos on flickr.