Texan experimentalist claire rousay’s foray into melancholic, folk-inflected pop would possibly shock followers of her tactile collages of on a regular basis seems like jingling keys, overheard dialog, and suggestive murmur. These higher acquainted with the total extent of her sprawling catalog of self-described “emo ambient”—which spans hyperpop, text-to-speech recordings, and an unfinished Elliott Smith cowl—would possibly merely see this as one other left flip. In actual fact, on sentiment, rousay brings collectively strands from her earlier work right into a revealing self-portrait, channeling her experimental musical language into the type of earnest pop she evidently loves however till now has largely shared as one-offs, swapping her habitually atmospheric ambient items for shorter, extra melodic, lyrically pushed slowcore songs.
The place a softer focus and every thing excellent is already right here have been made up of summary, shifting collages, sentiment has a steady core in her spare guitar enjoying and craving vocals, to which she applies heavy Auto-Tune. Regardless of sentiment’s extra typical singer-songwriter mode, although, rousay doesn’t solely abandon her avant-garde leanings, utilizing discovered sounds and subject recordings to counterpoint the album’s texture, depth, and storytelling. The end result opens up a brand new expressive frontier in her work, discovering unique, affecting methods of exploring despair and need.
Despair figures closely in sentiment’s lyrics. The album begins with a harrowing confession: “It’s 4 p.m. on a Monday and I can’t cease sobbing.” The road, learn by Theodore Cale Schafer, comes from rousay’s telephone—an analog twist on the text-to-speech experiments on it was all the time price it. sentiment’s frank, conversational lyrics construct on an analogous nexus of dread and black humor. Heavy consuming (“Blacking out ’til I really feel okay” she sings on “it could possibly be something”) options all through. Self-loathing proliferates: “I hate me too,” she sings on “lover’s spit performs within the background.” The album is stuffed with sexual longing however hyperlinks romance to emotions of inadequacy: “Spending half of my complete life providing you with head, simply in case it’s worthwhile to forgive me in the future,” she admits on “head.” Exploring the “infinite void” described in “4pm,” rousay finds a dense tangle of recollections, confessions, and feelings.
rousay’s concern throughout sentiment will not be a lot that these emotions will overwhelm her, however that they is perhaps crushed into numbness—“a fair worse actuality,” as her be aware in “4PM” concludes. The album’s regular, torpid pacing mirrors rousay’s dejection; “asking for it” swells dramatically earlier than shortly really fizzling out, as if it has misplaced its will.
rousay explores anhedonia most affectingly by way of her voice, utilizing Auto-Tune to present it a robotic high quality. Impressed by Younger Thug and Sparklehorse, she used the impact on final 12 months’s single “Sigh in My Ear” in addition to on Bandcamp uploads like “meg,” “a bullshit inventive (dressing room demo)” and “new monkey (unfinished elliott smith cowl).” The vocal impact was stark and incongruous in these one-offs, seemingly utilized primarily for its putting sound. In sentiment, nonetheless, by crushing rousay’s emotive outpourings right into a impartial, dehumanized monotone, the impact turns into a robust conceptual system, exploring the best way despair may give solution to numbness and exhaustion.
