Across Sasami’s first two albums, the Los Angeles songwriter drew impressively from a range of musical traditions: shoegaze’s wandering guitar riffs, nu metal’s gnashing arrangements, county-pop’s storytelling. The result was a dynamic, constantly evolving sound, which Sasami channeled to express introspection, frustration, and deep, almost mythological, yearning. On her new album, Blood on the Silver Screen, she commits to pop music’s campiness to convey the way love and heartache magnify even the most fleeting memories into heart-wrenching melodrama. It’s an interesting pivot, but much of the music feels too aimless to effectively deliver these intense emotions.
Sasami pulls inspiration from moments where the mundanity of suburban life takes on an unexpected, subsuming intensity—she’s cited gym music, strip malls, and CW show soundtracks as touchstones—and likewise, her music is most effective when her earnest, plainspoken lyrics escalate into theatrical gestures. On “Figure It Out,” a fairly straightforward love song about unconditional commitment, Sasami repeats the word “baby” with a building intensity that transforms the track into a revelation. Her vocals smoulder on top of explosive instrumentation: echoing synths, scampering drums, and a blazing guitar solo. Hearing her sing, you imagine flowers blooming in triple time. Similarly, on “Lose It All,” Sasami shares an obvious admonition: “When you love, sometimes you lose it all.” It would come across as trite were it not for the way her falsetto warbles across kitschy Billy Joel-style keys, equal parts whimsical and unsettling.
But the music doesn’t lean into outsized production or soaring hooks often enough. Many of the songs are caught in no man’s land, lacking both the experimental edge of her earlier work and the energy and sheen that make great pop music so life-affirming. Dancy cut “Slugger” sounds like a “Welcome to New York” knockoff without ever approaching the 1989 track’s propulsiveness or winking glamour. Instead, “Slugger” is both belabored and muted, its songwriting mainly comprising a series of arbitrary comparisons. “I’m cry-cry-crying like Dolly from 9 to 5” is simply not a strong enough metaphor to be used four times in a song.
Country-pop ballad “Just Be Friends” is similarly unfocused, without a detailed memory or narrative to ground it. As she describes the start of a failed relationship, the nondescript lyrics—“Never wanna go home, lying in your bedroom/Always talking on the phone”— are especially dissatisfying given how beautifully Sasami used the same genre to meditate on the impossibility of capturing nature’s beauty on her last album’s closer, “Not A Love Song.”
There are plenty of weird, wandering moments on Blood on the Silver Screen that recall Sasami’s avant-garde roots: her eerie, cascading vocal delivery on “Nothing but a Sad Face On,” the wall of grinding guitars on “The Seed.” These flourishes give the music intrigue, but they don’t always result in an arresting song. Across her last three projects, Sasami has proven she can pull from whatever sonic tradition she pleases to add textured, unexpected elements to her work. But Blood on the Silver Screen shows that she could benefit from further defining her own cohesive, singular point-of-view. As it stands, her songs feel distant; she sings about heartache, one of life’s most evocative experiences, as if she’s on the end of a game of telephone, recounting someone else’s experiences fourth-hand.
