Vinyl LP, Compact Disc (CD)
Claire rousay opens sentiment with an act of musical subterfuge. We hear a monologue about a depressive episode, spoken not by rousay but collaborator Theodore Cale Schafer, and then a blitz of machinic clicks and whirrs. For a few seconds, it’s as if we’re listening to one of rousay’s notably raw ambient albums. But then, amid the cascading drums and distorted guitar of the first song proper, an Auto-Tuned rousay sings, “I’m not drowning yet but the rain is coming in.” It’s an emotional outpouring so cathartic that there can scarcely be any doubting what the Los Angeles-based artist said in a recent interview—sentiment is her “emo record.”
Rousay has long toyed with the trappings of the simultaneously mocked and celebrated genre, particularly on her “emo ambient” collaborations with Mari Maurice (more eaze). But where the Auto-Tuned songcraft of “smaller pools” on 2021’s an afternoon whine was surrounded by more typical ambient compositions—deft fluttering synths and gurgling noise—on sentiment the balance is inverted. Here, the songs are the focus, and they mine not the glossy pop side of emo but it’s more homespun variations. Take “it could be anything” whose lyrics are devastatingly direct. “Trying not to visualize your skin by candlelight/ While he gets what he needs,” sings rousay, but the stinging candor is offset by violin (played by Maurice), all delicate wolf notes and mournful bows—cinematic in its prettiness.
In their deliberate composition, judicious pacing, and spareness, these songs evoke one of emo’s associated genres: slowcore (or sadcore as it’s sometimes referred to). On “lover’s spit plays in the background,” rousay’s voice glides across gossamer threads of plucked guitar at a stately 60 BPM, every emotion given room to breathe in the surrounding ambient ether. Elsewhere, as on “sycamore skylight,” the ether becomes the entire track, rousay’s gently strummed guitar and Maurice’s violin and electronics conjuring the perfect soundtrack for idle daydreaming in bed—a moment of tentative calm amid the emotional bloodletting.
You shouldn’t let the understatedness of sentiment obscure its quietly revelatory quality. Rousay has applied the production techniques of her ambient music to what is essentially a singer-songwriter record. The careful treatment of sound and editing, the close-mic’d textures, the occasionally jarring interjection of musique concrète elements, the sonic ephemera of domestic rustlings—it’s all here, filling the negative space around this beautifully unhurried emo rock, indeed enhancing it. In transitioning to a more direct form rousay hasn’t lost sight of what makes her work special: She continues to let all of life into her recordings.
