In 2017, the singer-songwriter Claire Cronin published an essay called “Blue Light on the Screen: Notes on Horror.” Writing about her lifelong attraction to ghost stories and slasher flicks, the Athens, Georgia-based artist explored the comforts of the genre—being able to predict what will happen next, who the killer might be, when to expect a resolution. In one section, she lists her favorite movie taglines, disembodied from their titles so that they read like poetry (“They’re here,” “They won’t stay dead,” “Before you die, you see:”). In another, she makes you feel genuinely sad for all the franchises that ended prematurely and ambiguously: death without resurrection. “Perhaps more than any other genre,” she writes, “horror demonstrates the pleasure of repetition.”
It’s a quality that horror shares with folk music, and Cronin’s fascination with one has aided her mastery in the other. Big Dread Moon, her latest album, is full of scenes you’ll recognize from any number of Halloween classics. There are werewolves and ghosts, guns and knives, fangs and blood, ominous weather and dolls in gowns. Cronin has a cracked, cawing delivery like Will Oldham or Scout Niblett—artists who could turn from conversational to spectral with the quietest gesture. Her music is alluringly sparse; most of the arrangements feature only her guitar and Ezra Buchla’s viola, with occasional synth and percussion for texture.
Like her nonfiction writing, Cronin’s lyrics are kaleidoscopic. She writes from the center of the action, wandering through the dark; we’re likely to see the danger lurking before she does. In “What the Night Is Thinking,” she sings in the third-person to justify this instinct: “We want wild winds,” she sings. “We want bones bleached and scattering.” She often does the job herself, writing songs that swirl like tornadoes through quiet streets. “Tourniquet” is a blues song bled dry; “Like a Shield” surges like a ’90s alternative rock hit stripped to its bleakest form. Stretches of silence in horror films generally forecast just how violent things are about to get. Cronin’s songwriting is heavy with pre-traumatic calm.
The simplicity of her music grounds its intensity. Many singers could take a line like “Coffins long for the touch of death” and have it sound vaguely creepy, but Cronin has a gift for confiding it like something she has experienced first-hand. This balance between tenderness and terror, the supernatural and the quotidian, is crucial to her work. Movie screens appear in multiple songs, while “Call Out” finds her surprised by the way blood looks in real-life—brighter than she expected. The album’s peak is “Wolfman,” a slow, menacing ballad sung with the devotion of a love song. Her words are vague enough to sound like a nightmare but specific enough so that you can see the lamplight, hear the rain on the streets. It’s the kind of whispered story that’s usually laughed off early in a film, only to become frighteningly real by the end. When she sings, you believe every word.
