Sasami's Blood On the Silver Screen embraces the paradoxical glamour of troubled romance

Where Sasami’s albums once began with frustrated vocals atop a brash metal backdrop that gets off on rodent torture, they now arrive hosting a succint, full-blown pop record perfectly acceptable for daytime radio, nurtured by a newfound superstar alter-ego. Predictably, she’s shied away from diving too deep into the pop realm up until this point. Immediately upon entry, however, Blood On the Silver Screen makes an effort to blend the barriers separating rock and pop: Sasami wakes us up to her serious ability to excel across both fields.

Sasami is a musical veteran and extraordinaire in all respects. As a multi-instrumentalist (who’s more or less best friends with her French horn), songwriter, producer, and former music teacher, she has built up proficiency that most bands won’t be able to reach over an entire career’s worth of time, across all of their members. Whilst her vocal style can fall short in matching the muscle of the instrumentation she employs, Blood On the Silver Screen understands power and grandeur – mostly deriving from firm hooks and epic guitar solos. In fact, the album does well as a high-octane rock record, so much so it makes you wonder why some tracks feel ever so slightly diluted: “Just Be Friends” takes advantage of the quintessential break-up lamentation formula – although Sasami is provenly capable of snatching stereotypes and smashing them into astonishing, glistening pieces. Perhaps her pledge to discard her own sonic rulebook for this record has ironically allowed her music to slip into the boundaries of everybody else’s rulebook instead.

Blood On the Silver Screen centres around difficult, damaged love – it doesn't drown in its own mess of tears, but it doesn’t evolve either – fortunately, it dresses itself up and dazzles in ill-fated confidence. There’s a recurring dichotomy between right and wrong, between what the persona wants, and what the other version of herself wants. It’s tough to navigate, and suddenly, these heavy rock/flickering pop fusions take on an additional thematic weight. One track labels the relationship in question as “tragicomic”, and alongside recurring biblical references, it’s clear that heavenly exoneration in this state is no more than a foolish, passing wish to a lust-struck woman whose “mouth of honey is worth the sting”.

“In Love With A Memory” offers Sasami and Clairo the floor to gracefully whirl around a relationship’s regrettable progression, both hesitant to let go, and nursed by an impractical desire for escapist dreams of separation. Admitting that much of Blood On the Silver Screen plunges into “romanticism to the point of self destruction” – or more so in the belief that there surely exists an inevitable synergy between two seemingly opposing forces – Sasami reminds us on dense and reflective closer “The Seed” how “Love and pain, they’re intertwined.” This record certainly scales the emotional spectrum, for better or for worse: it’s an epic, dramatised outpour. Not exactly what we’ve come to expect from Sasami, though she wears a convincing costume.