Marry Me is great avant-indie pop, with colorful flourishes of jazz, noise, and bossa nova.  St. Vincent, the solo project of sometime Polyphonic Spree and Sufjan Stevens band member Annie Clark, does everything right on this first outing: a varied collection of instrumentation and sounds are assembled to make an album that is accessible, but just left-of-center enough to push boundaries.  The cabaret theatricality of “Paris is Burning” shouldn’t sit so comfortably next to the torch song-and-gospel of “All My Stars Aligned,” yet Marry Me works as the sum of its parts.  It twists and turns, but it makes sense and, more importantly, you’ll want to hear it again as soon as it’s finished.  The tie that binds is, of course, Clark’s vocals.  She’s got range and personality in a way that doesn’t often translate to record these days.  Her voice is big, it’s uniquely hers, and it does weird things…but it never panders to the twee or self-ironizing conventions of the indie scene.  It takes a delicate touch to make a quilt from a pile of quirks, but St. Vincent’s debut stitches art and function quite nicely.

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