Earlier in 2024, claire rousay made a considerable splash with sentiment, an LP that expanded her experimental approach to include vivid strains of melancholic pop, a development she tagged as emo ambient. Released by Thrill Jockey, the album registered as the start of something big. Supporting this notion is a remix album that’s freshly available on vinyl right now (in a limited edition of 250 copies) with a digital release coming on November 6. A striking compendium, sentiment remixed serves both as a wide ranging yet cohesive extension of its source material and a fully realized standalone work.
claire rousay has amassed a sizeable body of work since hitting the scene in 2017, and on a variety of formats. There’s vinyl and compact disc and even a flexi disc in there, but predominate are digital releases and cassettes. The last of these formats is fitting as her early work extends from an experimental tradition that embraced spindles and spools of tape as a cost effective mode of (often self) distribution.
It really only takes a listen to the 2021 LP a softer focus to apprehend that rousay is the real deal as an experimentalist. Incorporating field recordings into pieces that extend from ambient and musique concrète traditions, rousay’s work retains a contemporary feel that has only increased as she has chosen to explore the possibilities of song form.
rousay’s tendency toward pop predates sentiment by a bit, and eclectically. There’s an Elliott Smith cover in her oeuvre amongst a handful of one-off digital singles leaning into song structure over abstraction as she’s honed her skills as a guitarist. There’s also a predilection for Auto-Tune that really comes to the fore on sentiment in an appealingly non-gimmicky manner.
But sentiment isn’t as sharp a stylistic right turn as the above might suggest. In particular, “sycamore skylight” and “w sunset blvd” are very much in the mode of her earlier stuff, while opener “4pm” begins with the spoken words of Theodore Cale Schafer communicating via phone message a nagging emotional despair stemming from emptiness and loneliness that should impart that the record’s emo inclinations are far from superficial.
The pacing (and the general mood) of sentiment has brought comparisons to slowcore, and that’s fair. But there are flashes of downer folk and honest-to-goodness strings soaring beyond standard baroque gestures and hitting their peak in the magnificently achy “iii.” In pop terms, “head” makes it immediately clear that rousay remains pretty far from the mainstream, though “it could be anything,” with its late beauty-move crescendo, and the brutally concise “asking for it” establish sincerity over subversion. Picking up on side two is the indie-folk fragility of “lover’s spit plays in the background,” while “please 5 more minutes” is sturdier and grander in its sweep.
rousay is a fierce collaborator, so sentiment remix, if unexpected, makes total sense. “Listening to Every Vocal Track on sentiment” blends tumbling glitch and icy drift courtesy of Andrew Weathers, who mastered sentiment. Patrick Shiroishi adds smoldering saxophone to “it could be anything” to deepen the core track’s gorgeousness. Maral’s mix of “ily2” gets into the vicinity of the club without fully committing to a program of danceability.
Opening side two, Gretchen Korsmo abstracts “asking for it” before reining it in to recognizability, rousay’s friend and frequent collaborator more ease greatly extends “asking for it” and gives it a swell canned symphonic twist, and AMULETS (aka Randal Taylor) slathers “head” in noisy rock-tinged electronics. The album closes with Matthew Sage’s mix of “lover’s spit plays in the background,” subtle at the start and growing increasingly bold toward the finish.
Remix albums can often be hackneyed affairs but sentiment remix avoids the clichés of remaking and remodeling by not forcing any issues. Instead, the set is a solid complement to rousay’s already impressive strides with sentiment.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
A-
