by David Wilikofsky
Over the past few years, claire rousay has emerged as a breakout star in experimental music circles. Though rousay has dabbled in many styles through her solo and collaborative recordings, she’s perhaps best known for longform musique concrète compositions built from field recordings and text to speech software. sentiment, her latest album and first for Thrill Jockey, has been billed as her pop moment. On it, rousay seamlessly marries the textures of her more experimental output with traditional song structures and depressive lyrics, ending up in a nebulous zone between emo, ambient and experimental music.
sentiment starts with something familiar to her fans: a confessional monologue. This one, delivered by collaborator Theodore Cale Schafer, is a meditation on depression and anhedonia. “On paper, my life is nice…unfortunately, there is a seemingly infinite void inside of me. and a darkness that won’t lift” he flatly intones. We soon hear other sounds (mechanical buzzing, a swell of strings, a gently plucked guitar melody) which eventually coalesce into a slowcore ballad about fucking and fucking up delivered by an auto-tuned rousay. These subjects continually pop up throughout the album, tangled up with a host of other complex feelings: inadequacy, longing, loneliness. Occasionally the album veers into more familiar musique concrète territory (see “W Sunset Blvd” or “Sycamore Skylight”), but they feel like extensions of the sonic universe rousay is building. Listen closer and the same types of textures hover in the background of her songs; it’s just a matter of where she wants us to focus our attention moment to moment.
If I were to lob one criticism at sentiment, it’s that there isn’t much to differentiate one track from another. Each one seems to move at a similar narcotic pace, built on the same basic combination of robotic vocals and glacial guitar riffs (with some field recordings thrown in for good measure). But given rousay’s subject matter is crushing depression, this is feature more than a bug. The album is a perfect sonic encapsulation of the headspace it lives inside. It’s the sound of laying in bed all day, occasionally sensing the outside world humming along without you: hearing fragments of conversations and birdsong outside the window, watching the sunlight slowly drift across your floor. It’s the sound of rumination, self-flagellation, emptiness. It’s music that sounds light as a feather but can crush you under its weight.