Squeeze

Sasami Ashworth’s second solo album melds two distinctively 1990s sound worlds as it asks: Can a song ever make it all the way to another person?

SASAMI’s second album ends with a song that plays almost like a fable. A singer hears an astonishing melody in her head. She writes it down so that, later, she can sing it to her love. When she does, what comes out is “not a love song—just a beautiful, beautiful sound.” What rang rich and full in her imagination falls limply in the air between her and the object of her devotion. Meaning peels away, leaving only pleasure that evaporates on the wind.

TRENDING NOW

The One Song Jay Som Wishes She Wrote

Can a song ever make it all the way to another person? This question concludes Squeeze, and in doing so winds back through the album as a whole. SASAMI—the mononymic project of Sasami Ashworth, a former member of Cherry Glazerr and now a Los Angeles-based solo artist whose debut album came out in 2019—agitates her work toward the belief that music can get there, that it has to. “Do you like me? Do you notice me?” she speaks against a snaking, fuzzed bassline on “Need It to Work.” “Meet me in the dark,” she murmurs, her voice muffled and menacingly downpitched, against “Say It”’s industrial seethe. All across Squeeze, characters grasp at each other while questioning if their hands will reach far enough to meet. Their doubt adrenalizes their belief, serrates its edges, makes it tender.

In staging these scenes of clasping and dispersal, Ashworth melds two distinctively ’90s sound worlds. Squeeze holds Korn, Disturbed, and System of a Down in one hand; Sheryl Crow, Faith Hill, and Shania Twain in the other. Opener “Skin a Rat” bares blood-ringed teeth with its gnashing percussion, howled group vocals, and acidic guitar lines. Country-pop standout “Tried to Understand” frames those same teeth in a magazine-perfect smile. Like the recently reunited experimental metal group Faith No More, Ashworth delights in using genre as material rather than protocol. When I use the terms “nu-metal” or “country-pop” to describe what she does, I don’t use them to point to scripts that she’s followed. I mean that she’s hurled each loose grouping against the wall and watched their respective innards drip down until their colors start to blend.

When they blend, it’s awfully fun. The sunny-but-severe “Make It Right” pairs a delectably beachy guitar tone with a drumbeat that constantly spins off from the main pattern, progressively expanding the scope of the sound field. “The Greatest” works as both a delicate breakup ballad, a safe haven for nursing wounds, and an altar on which to swear bloody revenge against whoever broke your heart—a duality reminiscent of Fleetwood Mac’s most charged moments. The Daniel Johnston cover “Sorry Entertainer” electrifies and fleshes out an originally spare recording, surfacing the bitterness and exhaustion of a song about digging demons out of your head with the point of your lyric-writing pencil.

ADVERTISEMENT

Squeeze toggles between a wide-open open sky and a cramped basement ceiling, threading the same desire through both scenes. Below ground, the body mingles with other bodies, rendered indistinct in the crush of a mosh pit. Above, in a daze, the body bleeds into its environment, similarly losing its specificity. Music is a way you can lose yourself. And once that’s lost, the distance between the source of a song and its receiver isn’t so stark. They were never really different to begin with.

omg看封面以为是什么神婆妓女音乐结果是摇滚

这张专辑封面的设计者是指导过碧婆the gate MV和小枝cellophane MV的华裔视觉艺术家Andrew Thomas Huang，封面上的书法则来自sasami的妈妈

封面造型为Andrew Thomas Huang一手打造（小枝Cellophane,碧婆The Gate, Mutual Core等），灵感来源是日本民间神话中的妖怪Nure-Onna(濡女)，传说是溺死于海中女子的亡灵所变，人头龙身，有着一双漂亮的蛇眼，以及飘逸的长发，并以美貌行骗，吸食人血。

8.6/10：SASAMI的音乐富有时间的进行感。随着歌曲一首接一首的播放，她不断挑战着传统聆听习惯的极限，又不断地找到新的突破。她的时间感不表现为一种成长，而只是一种流动的叙事，这也是音乐作为艺术的一个最重要的特征之一吧。她真的是在创造艺术，带着满满的敬佩与充沛的赤诚。

曲目安排非常独道，两种曲风唱法间隔性变化，SASAMI不断在黑暗与光明之间交替变幻，一首将你撕碎，一首又给你一个拥抱

美到维纳斯一睁眼就流产了。