Sasami

What's striking about Sasami Ashworth, the American queer musician of South Korean descent, is her innate gift for transformation, her sheer eclecticism. After graduating from the Eastman School of Music in 2012, where she honed her skills on French horn, she played keyboards in the rock band Cherry Glazerr until 2018. Across her first two solo albums, Sasami has shown the strength, skill and curiosity to make sudden swerves in her musical style. While “Sasami” – her self-titled debut – sat in 2019 somewhere between light, confessional indie-rock and intimate, slightly jagged bedroom-pop, the follow-up “Squeeze” (2022) proved far sharper-edged, embracing industrial / nu-metal sounds and revealing a songwriting craft in constant growth. With “Blood On The Silver Screen” comes yet another about-turn, this time towards mainstream pop, with sparse – and sudden – guitars propping up rhythms that often lean towards EDM, eyes fixed on some of the names that routinely top the charts across the Atlantic.

The Taylor Swift hurricane is spawning countless imitators, not necessarily new to the game: Gracie Abrams has become the textbook case, but the new single by Chappell Roan, “The Giver”, is no less telling, sounding like it fell straight out of one of teenage Swift's country-pop records. Even far more seasoned singers are falling in line: just listen to “How Bad Do You Want Me”, track 8 on “Mayhem”, the new album by Lady Gaga. Taylor's songwriting, the killer choruses, the powerful bridges, a certain way of using her voice, with surprise tricks ready to catch the listener off guard – these are all elements that today's pop songwriters are studying closely. And Sasami has done her homework very well indeed: listen carefully to the first two songs on “Blood On The Silver Screen”, which immediately set the mood for the album, “Slugger”, and even more so the following “Just Be Friends” (pay particular attention to the chorus): we're clearly within the stylistic orbit of the record-breaking superstar, tracks perfect both for dancing and for heartbreak, steeped in melancholy yet also driven by a certain desire for lightness, which in Sasami's case comes through in club-ready rhythmic beds.

The songs that make up “Blood On The Silver Screen” mostly deal with matters of the heart, and there's even a revenge song, “Possessed”, which could be filed somewhere alongside Caroline Polachek; in “I'll Be Gone”, on the other hand, the verse structure recalls “Perfect Stranger” by FKA Twigs (from the recent “Eusexua”), with an energetic electropop gait. The guitars surface in the teen soft-rock of “Love Makes You Do Crazy Things”, in “For The Weekend”, a song about the short-term romance imposed by dating apps, but also in “Honeycrash” and the closing “The Seed”, with layered harmonies that happily flirt with grunge. The duet with Clairo, “In Love With A Memory”, owes much to the more nostalgic strain of The Strokes (or Phoenix, take your pick), while Lana Del Rey is the most obvious reference point in the construction of “Nothing But A Sad Face On”, further smoothing the edges and sweetening Sasami's originally raw alt-rock spirit.

What results is an album that at times feels impersonal, built by capturing reflections from other stars of contemporary music. It's hard to tell whether this is a shrewd move or a heartfelt tribute, but the end result is enjoyable all the same, at times gripping, even if it never quite reaches the level of the references it draws on. Longtime fans (not that there are that many, let's be honest...) would surely have preferred a less polished production, fewer calculated choices and rougher sounds overall, but credit is due to Sasami for managing to bring a certain tension to typically radio-friendly aesthetics. Writing pop songs is a craft that deserves respect, and we may well have gained a promising new popstar on the alternative circuit, one worth keeping a close eye on. We might have... if she didn't seem intent on changing face every single time, constantly reshaping her own future. Tireless metamorphoses.

(Claudio Lancia)