A timeless-sounding album from a youthful yet mature artist, Clairo's Sling stuns in it's vivid poetry and musical control. Following Clairo's sold out headline show at 02 Academy Brixton, Releases Editor Ewan Samms reflects on her sophomore album, over a year after release.
I will probably never forget the first time I listened to Clairo’s Sling. The first listen is a sacred thing, and so I treat it as such. I usually like to find a peaceful spot, maybe a bedroom or cozy corner or a bright place outdoors. In this case, I was in my teen bedroom in my parents’ house, midsummer sun streaming through the well-worn window, spent after dozens of attempts climbing onto the roof. I planted myself directly between the two speakers, angling them subtly to form a perfect stereo field, (it’s the little things). For context, this wasn’t my first time listening to Clairo, having the pleasures and woes of my seventeenth year as a human soundtracked by her debut, Immunity. It’s an endearing effort, clumsy in places and overflowing with intention and experience. Sling, on the other hand, found a way to attach itself so relentlessly to pretty much every month of the first year of my twenties. Needless to say, it soundtracked the rest of the Summer, being my morning music on the bike ride to my café job, it somehow inserted itself into my walk to campus, supervising study sessions and inviting itself to every cup of tea I shared with a friend. It’s the spirit of Sling, it’s youthfulness and dread and dreaming and longing, that resonated with my 20-year-old self. Couple this reverently relevant voice with flawless production in a timeless ilk, and it’s obvious how Sling has become one of my favourite things to exist. But, I didn’t know any of this on my first listen.
Clairo released Sling around a year ago, and as I write this I’m on a train to London ahead of her rescheduled show in Brixton. (Thanks Covid-19 for moving the show to a few days before my 21st, I knew we were friends after all). How else to indulge ahead of this potentially life changing, tear-jerking and slightly irresponsible, given the start of term, event than to reflect on the album in a track-by-track breakdown?
Sling begins with a sudden softness. Clairo throws her croon to the left speaker as weirdly windy and cold keyboards bring together a sort-of ambiguously melancholic soundstage. A drum kit taken straight out of the back seat Joni Mitchell’s big yellow taxi banish the keys and pull Clair’s vocals into the spotlight. “I’m stepping inside a universe defined against my own beliefs”. The music industry is not an inviting place for young women, let alone those of Claire Cottrill’s viral success and marketable prettiness. It’s one of Sling’s main conflicts, that for Claire to exist as Clairo, she must compromise for the shortcomings of the music industry. Cottrill spends the opening track, Bambi (a self-comparing image), throwing paints at the wall, hinting Slings sonic palette to the listener. She paints with colours of comfort, wobbly guitars and indulgent pianos, all sprawled around the soundstage like woodland creatures converging on a singsong. As much as the images of “crying before you know why”, and “blisters and the dirt left in between your fingers”, Bambi sounds about as cute as an opener can get, and by it’s end, the listener finds them comfortable in their seat, ushered in by pillowy woodwinds.
"She paints with colours of comfort, wobbly guitars and indulgent pianos, all sprawled around the soundstage like woodland creatures converging on a singsong"
Clairo, as a viral musician, is how we knew her for her early career. Sling would have undone this reputation for the singer, had it not been for Amoeba. It is here where Cottrill and producer Jack Antanoff show the sheer audacity they are willing to employ across the album. This track feels like a Where’s Wally game of picking out the woodwinds from guitar lines, the chords from the melodies and the drum kit from the smashing milk bottles, (there’s all sorts of these artifacts across the record). The duo somehow manages to make a track about self-criticism and neglect and make it groove harder than any other track on Sling. There is a laundry list of minutia, details and techniques that make Amoeba such a satisfying track, but it all comes back to that flawlessly rhythmic hook. It would be wrong to say that the chorus’ lyrics are straightforward or even overtly catchy, but it has this cheeky tendency to root itself in one’s mind, veering it’s head in an ambiguous hum in which none of the correct lyrics are included. It’s cute! It’s fun and it's whimsical and it’s a true high point on the album.
By the third track, Partridge, it’s clear that the listener can’t necessarily just let Sling wash over them, as enticing as this is. Clairo’s saying a lot across this album, not only in thematic depth but in literal lyrical excess. Partridge, and it’s neighbour Zinnias, are dense in their poetry; ignoring the flow of lines and verses easily leads one to disorientation, but follow the throughlines and some of Sling’s main themes are revealed. “It sure sounds nice to settle down for a while”. Cottrill’s reflections on domesticity brought on by getting a dog, (featured in the liner notes for playing chimes and stomping), observing her sister’s settling down and moving home during covid. This independence is sourly undermined in the following track.
Blouse is a testament to doing a lot with a little. Using simple open chords and loose picking patterns, as well as a triple-tracked vocal line, Claire conjures a deeply sad and bitterly relatable ballad. The mix of affectionate detailing and mournful submission vividly reflect the push and pull of a dysfunctional relationship, with most of the burden falling on young Claire. Blouse is a song I point to when discussing Cottrill’s inclusion in the lineage of great songwriters, all equipped with this ability to sing lines that physically rip through your body. Take Adrianne Lenker’s Zombie Girl: “I was frozen in bed with a zombie girl, vacant as a closed down fair,” or the chorus to Joni Mitchell’s A Case of You. Claire displays a painful accuracy of the submission to a lover who simply won’t listen: “if touch could make them hear then touch me now”. Mournful ruminations like this inform the themes of domesticity, parenthood and responsibility as, all at once, Cottrill is exploring what these themes mean for her as a 22-year-old woman, whilst being constantly reminded of her vulnerability. Not to mention, the strings here are real tear-jerkers. (There aren’t a huge number of recordings of Claire playing live online, but I would highly recommend seeking out her performance of Blouse on The Jimmy Fallon Show. She displays this endearing nervousness that really intensifies the performance. It feels so personal and vulnerable and I really love it.)
Wade and Harbor are real instrumental successes on the album. The production duo of Cottril and Antonoff shines in it’s vintage aesthetic and handmade sound. Arrangements swirl with woodwind and articulate guitar passages, all laid to simple and satisfying drum lines. Wade displays Claire’s maturity, choosing not to regret yearning and sorrow having gained much of what she longed for in the first place. Harbor is similarly mature, taking a retrospective look at a relationship better off dead. (Prepare for another punch to the gut). The double tracked vocal and piano intro is deeply lonely, with such an honestly sad opening verse that I found myself returning to this track whenever I wanted to feel any sort of vague romantic sadness. This desperate first verse is layered with soaring vocal harmonies, beautifully chipper guitar arpeggios, (almost spookily so), and strings taken straight from Blouse, as if they just popped next door to help out with this song too. Strings take over the arrangement with a key change, where Claire recounts her rejection in a mournfully warm soundscape. Isolation follows as she sinks into loss, where Claire delivers one of those gut-punching lines I warned you about: “What I wish I had with you, I’ll pretend until it’s true, I don’t love you that way”. This line lingers as we shift into triple time, moving into an almost doolally waltz tinged with sadness, as Cottril moves to acceptance. Harbor succeeds in it’s storytelling, pulling the lucky listener down to the end of the relationship, dragging them through the mud of loss, and cushioning their fall into acceptance.
"Claire delivers one of those gut-punching lines I warned you about: “What I wish I had with you, I’ll pretend until it’s true, I don’t love you that way”."
Now, I admit, this is one of my more sickeningly positive reviews, but if I must criticise Sling, and if a dip must appear in the tracklist, it probably appears in Joanie. A pleasing palette of folky instruments on the one hand, a slightly aimless meander on the other. I appreciate the track for how it bridges Harbor and Reaper, but it doesn’t have the same effect on me as the rest of the album. In conversation with Zane Lowe, Clairo shared that the core of the album lies in Reaper, possibly the most physically warming song I’ve ever heard. I get the same comfort from a well simmered stew or a hot water bottle as I do from listening to Reaper. The loose stomps, the humming bass, the slide guitar which feels like it’s inside my brain: Audio comfort! I will never tire of hearing the differences in tape noise and fuzzy static as Joanie changes to Reaper. a truly Sling-esque detail. Cottrill’s reflections on domesticity culminate here as she, “keeps forgetting that (she)’ll have a family”. Painfully aware of her prescriptive role as carer and expectation of mothering as a woman, she shared to Lowe that she didn’t know her mother before she was a parent, and thus carer, resultantly confronting her own youth. In typical Clairo fashion, despite featuring a deeply comforting instrumental, the hook still delivers a devastating line: “I can’t f*ck it up if it’s not there at all”, (it being a beloved child… queue gut-punch). The pressure of care, being a ‘good’ parent and simply trying to not f*ck up a child is overwhelming on Reaper. The lyrical content here is near on perfection, with endless quotables and a fine line wandered well between excessive poetry and understandable metaphor. Again, I apologise for my sickening praise.
The record ends in a controlled manor, with a classy and confessional ballad in Little Changes, another relatable episode: “He loved me good enough to calm me down, but tried to trick me into little changes”. The song is unremarkable in a sense, given it’s simplicity, but is resultantly concise in it’s performance. Claire’s vocals are as bare here as they are across the entire record, and so it feels like getting up close and personal with the listener before ‘getting the band back together’, for Management. Clairo made the listener aware of her aversion to the music industry, and she returns to this to bookend the record. Cottrill rattles off further musings on domesticity, motherhood, and youth, surrounded by folky violins, flutes, clarinets, guitars, pianos and essentially every instrument featured across Sling. She manages, (pun intended and successfully deployed), to touch upon pretty much every thematic and musical theme featured on the album, whether in full or in passing; a pretty reliable tactic for a closing track. As I think back to my first listen once more, I remember smirking at a particular line in the track with a kind of, ‘wow, you f*ckin’ did it kid, you really did it’, energy: “Complain to the management, about my lack of self respect”.
Congratulations, you made it. After 1800 words of unrelenting praise for what is one of my favourite albums of all time, I have the chance to conclude. Whether or not Sling is a timeless classic entering the halls of greatness, straddled between Joni Mitchell’s Blue and the dawn of time, is a question I’m not concerned with. Does it enter my personal hall of greatness, hanging on the wall next to Joni Mitchell’s Blue and a 2003 DVD copy of School of Rock? Yes, obviously, you’ve just read 1800 words of unrelenting praise. In seriousness, I believe that Clairo’s Sling is a deeply rich, emotionally wise and vividly poetic album reflecting the simultaneous youth and maturity of a songwriter who is bound to engrain herself into the school of all-time great songwriters. That is if she chooses to remain in the music industry at all. Selfishly, I want more of Claire’s music. As soon as possible. Now, in fact. But in the same breath, Sling reminds me to consider artists as people, met with challenge and confliction in releasing art that I have the privilege of attaching to my Summers. If Claire Cottrill releases no further music after Sling, though I may shed an initially large tear, I think I have a good chance of finding satisfaction, warmth and wonder in Sling for the rest of my life. What a comfort.
Ewan Samms
Edited by: Ewan Samms
Cover image and in-article image courtesy of Clairo via instagram. In article video courtesy of Clairo via YouTube.
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