While she was charmingly fey on 2007 debut Marry Me and caustic on 2009 follow-up Actor, she's introspective and fanciful here, crafting a single mother's lullaby on the title track, and repenting for her insecure past on "Cheerleader." Yet she's no passive pom-pom girl: Clark's complex femininity, both self-possessed and keenly evolving, is what makes her music so powerful and fascinating.
- Spin
Eerie, hyper-edited choral samples haunt the mix on numerous tracks, whilst suggestive reverb artifacts sporadically play across the stereo field like a wintry breeze. Clark's vocals mirror this exacting strangeness, her delivery yielding variously to both seductive vulnerability and feverish agitation without surrendering entirely its veneer of stringency and control.Neither as immediate nor as stylistically dazzling as its predecessor, Strange Mercy manages to succeed entirely on its own terms by dint of Clark's willingness to embrace her own idiosyncratic impulses, and in doing so, to reveal more of herself.
- TheSkinny.co.uk
