"Squeeze" Sasami Album Review

Transfigure a mix of “confused and sad and horny” emotions any way you like — you still won’t be able to replicate SASAMI’s everywhere-at-once take on a metal sophomore showing.

Written by Raymond Lam

Is it real metal? The premier question for Sasami Ashworth’s new, abrasive sounds finds her surfing dive bars for rock bands and posing for a coveted New York Times feature, searching on her grand quest to “Appropriate White, Male Music.” Her previous experimentation attacked music’s homogeneity on the indie front: an untraditional start in the doldrums of music majoring (French horn, “to be awkward”) brewed a refined discography that quickly found its footing skating seamlessly between shoegaze and soft rock idealism, most notably on her 2019 glacier-surfing self-titled debut. It’s a hidden gem that often gets relegated as an understudy to the oft-worshiped and discographies of Mitski and Michelle Zauner of Japanese Breakfast — both of whom SASAMI’s toured with — but it’s hard not to sense an untapped talent that could be explored outside an oversaturated indie canon.

Before jumping into Squeeze, venture to her very own SASAMI Sounds playlist to best make sense of her new inspirations. It’s not curated particularly well, nor is it exactly pleasant to listen to in order: to avoid spoilers, skip past a shameless copy-paste off the Squeeze tracks, and the February 2022 edition of this playlist has more grating no-name punk bands than indie rock pleasantry, with some of Yoko Ono’s famous hissings and corny 70s power ballads slipped in between. It’s a poorly-crafted hodgepodge of genres and influences a music snob would slap together to impress their “uncultured” friends, yet it’s not unlike the capricious, serendipitous visions offered by Squeeze itself. Haphazardly reaching for whatever influences felt most convenient in the moment — metal or otherwise — was the only logical progression to continue her original, disruptive intentions and avert the paralysis of cult indie obscurity.

Unwrapping Squeeze’s layers reveals not a purist metal tribute nor a failed iterate of her former clean indie perfectionism: there’s no promises to ‘cement a new identity’ or ‘find a new sound’ that have become trite to even the most generous music reviewer. The ordering of the tracks oscillates between past and present at a breakneck pace, fitting rather neatly into a metal-indie-metal-indie algorithm built to maximize cognitive dissonance. It’s not unoriginal to the point of pleasing metalhead purists, nor can it sedate her cult indie fandom; her sound stumbles and jerks between fleeting callbacks to her softer roots and raging parodies of the genre she wished to subvert. Perhaps it’s her way of maximizing the spirit of metal itself: mystery, shock, surprise, and discomfort.

The one-two structure of SASAMI’s curated jarringness is established at the album’s outset: pleasantly-titled opener “Skin A Rat” is the closest voyeurism towards a classically nu-metal sound, with a cloying heavy guitar undercutting screams of a typical punk rebellion: “Put me off, get me off, make me want to set it off / Hell-f-cked-economy! / Crisis! / Identity!” Save for a brief interlude spiraling downwards on the song’s central riff (“There are many ways to skin a rat”), the song spans two-and-a-half minutes of SASAMI finding different ways to dodge a made-for-indie vocal haziness that haunts her shoegaze compositions. Finding “catharsis from the oppression and violence” of the marginalized, as her press releases tout, seems to be the original mission behind her new metallurgy, but she still speaks in tongues and anonymities even on the song’s brutal confessions, leaving only the rough frustrations behind.

The following track, “The Greatest,” is an about-face from the previous track’s aggressiveness in favor of submission and patheticism (“You drew a line and I licked the paint’), a part of the recurring indecisiveness that runs throughout the album’s eleven tracks. There’s callbacks to past music ed gigs, shot in the music video conducting a KISS tribute band-style power ballad replete with smoke machine fade transitions reminiscent of VHS tapes in all their 90s glory. Few other genres afford the same campy, dramatic impulses and starpower, so why not capitalize on it?

“Say It” uses scary chromatic guitar strums to strobe between forgiveness and a primalism not found in her music before (“I'm calling you back to me / Don't wanna agonize, just say it”). Alternatively, “Call Me Home” is a stunningly simple meditation on dependency and apathy, pairing reverbed harmonies and a meteoric wave of synths with a steady drumbeat and spins on 70s guitar mantras (“A little bit of a bad thing never hurt anyone / But too much of a good thing is like a hand on your neck”). This is the closest SASAMI gets to a cosmic ascent à la Weyes Blood’s “Andromeda.” For the most part, the cyclical nature of frustration and self-pity runs on, anonymous love-hate screenplays running through the album’s power struggles. SASAMI’s hamster-wheel chase for better relationship dynamics eventually runs its course, settling on a more perpetual frustration about here. Even her more intimate tracks blur the line between personal anecdote or a grander class struggle, but what kind of drama doesn’t eventually devolve to the same exhausted, weary conclusion?

Mantras and manic phrases seem like the antidote to SASAMI’S deeper conflicts left unspoken: “I need it to work / I need it to work,” she drones over the cyclical guitar riffs of the aptly-titled “Need It To Work.” It’s not unlike affirmations and reflections established in the past — “Thought I was the only one / Turned out I was everyone,” she chants endlessly on her previous album’s closer — though there’s more angst than wistful wondering now. The folksy “Tried To Understand” uses the same formula to make sense of both a lover’s cold-hearted demeanor and a meta-analysis of her own mercurial tendencies (“But you only like pleasure and pain / And nothing elsе in between”), flavored with a carefully-sarcastic bent imparted by a distant, far-away vocal color that even the most guttural screams can’t hide.

There’s even a self-criticism of her own dramaticisms in the album’s third act, with a series of catcalls and questionings directed at both herself and her music video’s body double for the final single, “Make It Right” (“No need to scream, no need to shout / What's there to say when's there's nothing left to say?”). For a song about compromise, it hardly reconciles its fit-for-TV parody of indie positivity, with a downburst of guitar amp static that arrives as quickly as it disappears. The penultimate tracks tend to veer towards obscurer facets of her new persona,, especially on the violent likes of “Sorry Entertainer,” an industrial metal rendition of Daniel Johnston’s album cut of the same name, and “Squeeze,” a psychedelic incantation rising and falling all over itself (“Pulling, peeling, stalking, stealing, wanting, dreaming, murder / Lying, stripping, licking, dripping, squeezing 'til you hurt her). Besides the title drop, it contains the simplest thesis of SASAMI’s new machinations (“I can conform / I can transform.”)

After the whirlwinds through metal, though, SASAMI chooses her more classical roots for “Feminine Water Turmoil,” arranging an instrumental string-quartet-plus-guitar opening act that flows shockingly gracefully into stunner “Not A Love Song,” employing a rare full-bodied warmth on a track listing filled with intentionally avant-garde contortions over rock-orchestra chorale and harmony (“I tried to turn it into something so profound / It's not a love song / Just a beautiful, beautiful sound”). It’s a surprising closer that posits a more holy, existential ending compared to the violent inward fantasies of the album’s metal episodes, but it’s a fitting one nonetheless.

If not for the whole metal gig, it’s hard to say that anything less than Squeeze’s special blend of deftly-made sardonicism towards metal and genre-blending would be enough to sate Ashworth’s gluttony for a new sound. Given a history of self-professed idiosyncrasy, an open-ended album full of tonal clashes and aggression compared to SASAMI’s perfected, straightforward indie formula is not an unexpected aberration — it’s a welcome reminder of her talent to reconfigure her artistry any way she pleases. In an interview with NPR, she describes the snake-bodied Nure-onna brandished on the cover of the record as her own symbol of “beauty and femininity and tenderness and sensitivity, but also aggression and violence and power.” Seizing all these contradictory elements—the on-again-off-again metal urges, the slightly-disconcerting animated ephemera, and the last breaths of an indie tonality that may-or-may-not return — seems to be the best way to comprehend the nebulous, exacted abrasiveness of a new SASAMI. Watch as she gains the upper hand over the realms of metal and indie composition, all at once.

Album Review: Strain, Contort, and ‘Squeeze,’ SASAMI-style