All Together

Pattern Is Movement and St. Vincent make beautifully strange bedfellows.

by A.D. Amorosi

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Published: May 19, 2009

[ rock/pop/experimental ]

It's lonely on the road. Bring a friend. That's the deal with Philadelphia's Pattern Is Movement and Brooklyn's Annie Clark, aka St. Vincent.

Clark heard the flighty math-pop of PIM's 2005 Stowaway after wrapping up her debut Marry Me and was so smitten with its ricochet rhythms and vibrating electronic whir, she talked the Eno-inspired Philly duo into booking a tour together.

"When we met her, she was playing to an iPod," says Chris Ward. He's the twitching percussionist to Andrew Thiboldeaux's fluttering high vocals and keyboards.

"We devised a plan to tour together and have PIM as her backing band. Marry Me comes out and the world gets to know what we already did — she's brilliant."

Fast forward to the present: St. Vincent hits the Billboard charts with her majestic Actor and asks PIM to open for her widely touted tour.

By the time 2008's icily layered 10cc-ish All Together came out, PIM had found its starry-eyed aesthetic in the gusty, vocal harmonies and stiff-arm drumming of "Bird" and the Liberace-in-space grandeur of "Sea Captain."

PIM has had a sound that since its first album — 2004's The (Im)possibility of Longing, recorded when the band had five members — was potently precise yet flyaway and melodramatic. As they whittled down to a duo, the arrangements grew layers while its percussion turned dicey.

For this tour they've got reams of new material that's less algebraic in its pulse and melody — songs without titles, sounds with less precision. The pair of old pals will record these tunes as soon as the St. Vincent tour stops for 2010 release.

One formless yet delicious song they've just released is an eerily epic cover of Beyoncé's pumped-up "Crazy in Love." Though the two have had a fondness for hip-hop since they became friends as kids, it was Antony and the Johnson's 2008 cover of the same song that grabbed the duo. "I was so moved by it," says Ward. PIM's version is equally transformative, albeit less achy and broken. Still, their new music promises to be wrenching in every way.

(a_amorosi@citypaper.net)

St. Vincent and Pattern Is Movement, Thu., May 21, 8:30 p.m., $12-$13, First Unitarian Church, 2125 Chestnut St. 866-468-7619, r5productions.org.

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