Andrew Bird, De Duif, November 25, 2008. Photo by Flickr user guuskrol

Wow. Damn. And wow. It’s hard to reconcile a concert like last night’s exquisite set by Andrew Bird. As mentioned several times by the performers during the evening, Washington D.C. was witness to the final installment of Bird’s tour with fellow genre-defier St. Vincent. The billing seems appropriate. Take one musically gifted, experimental, and odd male musician and combine with a female of the same description.

Annie Clark, the woman behind St. Vincent, is a spritely doe-eyed chanteuse whose music sounds all at once like Björk and Feist and Nancy Sinatra. She is an accomplished guitarist with a gorgeous voice. But she isn’t afraid to start and end her compositions with a wash of feedback and sound effects. In fact, she seems content knowing that both her lyrics and music engender a feeling of unease. In a New York Times interview in May of this year she said of her new album Actor, “I wanted to make something that had the whimsy and the sweet of something very pure, like the Disney films, but also something that was kind of bloody and gory and disgusting.” In her live show, Clark has distilled both of these perspectives. The music coddles and pummels in equal measure.

On stage behind her were two ten-foot tall articulated phonograph bells, which either looked inert, floral, or ominous depending on how they were lit. Through the set Clark smiled wryly, playing cuts from both Actor and 2007’s Marry Me. The live version of the brass boomer, “Marrow” was particularly fun. While thanking Bird for a great tour her voice quivered slightly, alluding to the tight bond that surely developed between the two over the last four months of traveling together.