Sasami - "Blood On the Silver Screen"

Top-notch Pop from a not-Pop artist

Sasami Ashworth is beholden to nothing. It’s a large part of why I opted to add her to the list despite knowing nothing about her. Blood On the Silver Screen is her third album, and it’s an entirely Indie Pop affair, but her first two albums were, according to the notes on Wikipedia from other critics, Shoegaze and Indie Rock/Nu Metal, respectively.

I haven’t listened to those yet, but they’re on my to-do list.

Sasami was born in the Bronx to a German father and a Zainichi¹ Korean/Japanese mother. She also grew up in the Unification Church, and has since referred to it as a cult. She attended the LA County High School for the Arts, ultimately graduating from the Eastman School of Music at the University of Rochester before starting her career making orchestral arrangements for films and commercials for a few years.

In 2015, she joined Cherry Glazerr, playing synths, and stayed with them for three years before going solo in 2018. The fact that she played synth in Cherry Glazerr does a lot to explain why her first album was Shoegaze.

But Sasami seems like the sort to hate settling, and she has taken Taylor Swift’s penchant for adjusting her sound with every album to new extremes.

Blood On the Silver Screen pulls on pop influences going back fifty years, with touches of New Wave showing up in “I’ll Be Gone”. Sasami reportedly used her classical training while getting lost in a variety of pop acts around the release of her last album, needing something different from the sounds she had been so focused on for that effort. In an interview with NME, she said:

“It felt edgy to do something that’s cringy to me. Anything that pushes me outside of my comfort zone is exciting and exhilarating. That means something different to everyone: double kick pedals or metal guitars or whatever, that would feel really shocking and new, but to me, that’s just standard now. Saying something really earnest feels edgy to me.”

Earnest emotional expression and romantic vulnerability is really the bread and butter of Blood On the Silver Screen.

But Sasami hasn’t done this one completely solo — she had big help from producers Jennifer Decilveo² and Rostam Batmanglij. Looking at the credits though, it’s clear that Decilveo was Sasami’s right hand here, and I think that it has largely paid off, as the album’s 12 songs are generally very good pop tracks, despite Sasami’s lack of familiarity with writing in the pop space.

I say ‘generally’ very good — there are some absolute bangers on here, though, and one of them is the song that kicks the album off: “Slugger” — an upbeat heartbreak song with mild baseball theming and a Dolly Parton reference in the chorus. It’s a solid opener that outshines much of the rest of the album.

This is the reason why “Just Be Friends” feels a little underwhelming — it’s the album’s second track and, good as it is, it just can’t compete. It just lands a little flat. But it also serves as a palette cleanser which allows “I’ll Be Gone” to shine. Following the downbeat, downkey³ melody of “Just Be Friends”, the upbeat, synthy New Wave/Electrodance vibes of “I’ll Be Gone” are kind of addictive.

A better downbeat song is “Honeycrash”, which carries a tone of ‘hurt-but-hopeful’, and is effectively the album’s title track, as the title Blood On the Silver Screen is contained within a line of this song.

“For the Weekend” has strong 90s/00s vibes, specifically for less glossy Pop Rock artists like Michelle Branch and Anna Nalick. This song will take a lot of millennials back to another time.

In general, the album’s second half is stronger than the first. While the album has “Slugger” and “I’ll Be Gone” within its first three tracks, the one track I really don’t like is also sitting there as the fourth song: “Love Makes You Do Crazy Things” is just obnoxious.

But that one song is the album’s biggest weakness. The rest of the album is solid — it’s cohesive in sound and vision, but each song has a unique identity, as well. Blood On the Silver Screen is easily the best Pop album I’ve heard yet this year. I’m definitely going to need to check out Sasami’s first two albums.

Rating: Teal

1. Zainichi Koreans are a specific ethnic group in Japan, consisting of descendants of Koreans who emigrated to Japan before 1945, specifically during the Japanese occupation of Korea.

2. Decilveo has written and produced with a lot of great (and varied) acts, including:

• Phantogram

• Kylie Minogue

• Hozier

• Fletcher

• Miley Cyrus

• White Reaper

• Royal & the Serpent

• Christina Perri

• Marina

• Cherry Glazerr

• Demi Lovato

• Ben Platt

3. This is not a legitimate musical term. It’s just the feeling I get from this song’s melody.