Claire Rousay has spent the previous few years constructing her personal adventurous type of digital collage, calling it “emo ambient.” Sentiment is her self-described pop album, constructing her late-night diary entries out of synth textures, warped melodies, robotic AutoTune vocals, rock guitar weaving out and in of the combo. Nevertheless it’s a implausible tour de power. She’s obtained a superb aptitude for twisted love songs, as in “Head,” the place she sings, “Spending half my entire life providing you with head/Simply in case it’s worthwhile to forgive me at some point for one thing I did.” The entire album flows like Brian Eno’s One other Inexperienced World by the ears of an enormous Pedro the Lion fan.
Rousay already has a wide-ranging catalog. The L.A. trans composer’s albums run from the austere musique concrete of A number of Erasures or I’ll Give You All My Love to hotter ambient works like By no means Cease Texting Me, A Softer Focus, and The whole lot Good Is Already Right here. However Sentiment is a spot to leap proper into her sonic world, with a correct pop tempo: 10 songs in 37 minutes. The indie-rock tunes combine with orchestral interludes, synth drones, discipline recordings, discovered sounds from nature or town streets, all filled with uncooked emotion.
“4pm” opens the album with a spoken-word “letter to the universe,” narrated by fellow ambient composer Theodore Cale Schafer. “It’s 4pm on a Monday and I can not cease sobbing,” Rousay admits by Schafer’s voice. “I’ve by no means felt this alone and discarded in my life.” “It May Be Something” is an confession of post-breakup jealousy, with guitar and strings, as she muses, in her digitally altered voice, “Do you ever take into consideration what I’m doing when he’s doing you? As a result of I do.” The guitar builds within the mode of basic Midwest emo, as she tries to get a grip on her hyperactive creativeness, “making an attempt to not visualize your pores and skin by candlelight whereas he will get what he wants.”
Her huge theme on Sentiment is loneliness, and he or she evokes it within the vast open areas within the music, from her AutoTuned vocal alienation to her nervously clumsy guitar. You may hear Sunny Day Actual Property or Seam in her taking part in, in ballads like “Please 5 Extra Minutes,” “Head,” and “Asking For It.” In “W Sundown Blvd” she’s simply standing on a road nook recording overheard chatter from strangers, on the lookout for any form of human connection.
Rousay climaxes Sentiment with a robust 15-minute sequence: two attractive synth compositions, “III” and “Sycamore Skylight,” with a bona fide pop gem tucked in between, “Lover’s Spit Performs within the Background.” She plucks her guitar, in bedroom-indie mode, breaking down her emotions as she listens to a Damaged Social Scene track. “‘Lover’s Spit’ performs within the background / Making me want I had somebody round,” she confides. The music haunts her with recollections of a wrecked relationship, as she sings, “I hate me too / You hate me too/However you’re keen on me nonetheless.” However then it flows right into a peaceable pastoral interlude — wind blowing, birds chirping, canine barking — as if a lonely coronary heart abruptly remembered to look out the window and see life occurring.
She indicators off with “ILY2,” that includes indie-folk artist Hand Habits, on a melancholic but hopeful observe. For all of the ache within the music, Sentiment by no means sinks into despair — it’s an album about touring by completely different sorts of short-term hell, on the best way to broader human emotions.
“Typically I’m simply grateful that I can nonetheless cry,” the narrator recites in “4pm.” “As a result of being numb is an excellent worse actuality, and only a few folks appear to return from that.” It swerves immediately into an digital dentist drill making noise whereas an EKG machine bleeps away. It’s a intelligent manufacturing flourish, but it surely additionally sums up every little thing Claire Rousay goes for on Sentiment: a musical antidote to numbness.
