by Anna Solomon (@chateau.fiasco)
Ambient musician claire rousay’s first proper foray into more traditional song forms, sentiment, nonetheless opens with a spoken sample, “It’s 4pm on a Monday and I cannot stop crying.” Perhaps the clip makes sense for an artist who is best known for her work trying to coax emotionality out of the sounds of mundane tasks and ideas. While she’s been building the “emo ambient” brand for a while, emo in her work has always been just a qualifier about the feeling of her field recording-based music. sentiment is far from the prolific composer’s debut, but it nonetheless feels like one, as it is rousay’s first project where songwriting and sound collaging exist together on equal footing. In the great tradition of emo, claire rousay is able to turn whatever small events and the light and sparse musical ideas that correspond to them into overwhelming feelings.
As “4pm” progresses, samples and synths appear and vanish, before the speaker concludes and an aggressive noise appears out of nowhere like an alarm clock. The album never gets this abrasive again, and the noise is joined gradually by a guitar figure that leads seamlessly into “head.” As the first proper song, it introduces the album’s style of longing loop-based pieces with slow tempos and lots of variated layers in the production. Even as autotune snaps rousay’s Conor Oberst-esque quaver into robotic precision, she maintains an unkempt indie vibe, and the tune as a whole feels lighter and quirkier than a lot of the project.
“it could be anything” continues the album’s build, as perhaps the most conventionally structured song in rousay’s catalogue yet. The simple and glacially slow drum beats of Duster or Low are recreated with dull samples, and the main guitar track is bleak and brooding. The production adds a lot of brightness to a track whose base is quite dower, with guitars, pads, and strings, all before the track gorgeously carries itself away under the repeated plea, “this is not your problem, this is not your fault, this is just me trying to stay involved,” definitely one of the album’s best moments.
All throughout, the strings feel just a bit janky and shrill, but in a deliberate way. This isn’t the kind of music you can imagine being played in a grand concert hall, it’s the sound of tiny apartments as makeshift practice rooms, stitched together out of any real space or time. A bit rough, perhaps warmups or first takes, but from players who don’t really need any more than that.
Even the most direct songs are always one step away from losing time and structure, falling back into ambient space, paralleling the love stories in the lyrics that seem to keep falling apart. There’s plenty of love and euphoria on sentiment, but it’s always fleeting. At her best, rousay is convinced she’ll lose whatever connection she has and only have herself to blame, and at her worst, she’s lying alone imagining exes with their new partners.
With this theming, “lover’s spit plays in the background” feels like the album’s centerpiece. With its descending chord loop and drawn-out melody, it seems to be constantly falling, always incomplete. rousay can only wish to get back what she once had. Even if the melody lifts in the chorus, it resolves itself back down with the admission “I hate me too.” Hope appears just to be shut back down.
The generally abstract soundscapes work surprisingly well against the direct lyrics, whereas the project could possibly come off as overly ponderous or overly whiny if they were a more traditional match for each other. Instrumentals like “sycamore skylight” leave extra space for narrativizing via the use of sound collaging, often just as or more emotionally potent than the tracks with lyrics, which may be down to rousay being more practiced at abstract sound art than lyric writing. Often, the samples of conversations like on “w sunset blvd” make for the best lyrics.
With its abstract and deconstructed musical approach combined with honest, even melodramatic songwriting, sentiment succeeds at capturing an intense yearning. To put it another way, even if there isn’t much of any punk to be heard, any distorted guitars or yelling, sentiment is as emo as it gets. It’s as much a testament to claire rousay’s skill as her lovesickness, and an excellent swing into a new style after years of interesting projects.