“Bloodless” is the title track from the new album by Claire Cronin, out November 12th via Orindal Records.
“Bloodless” is the new album by Los Angeles-based musician and writer Claire Cronin. Expanding upon the supernatural and metaphysical themes of her critically acclaimed 2019 album Big Dread Moon and her 2020 “horror memoir” Blue Light of the Screen (published by Repeater Books), Bloodless is a powerful work of haunted Americana by one of contemporary indie music’s finest singer-songwriters.
Like its musical predecessor, “Big Dread Moon“, the arrangements on “Bloodless”’s nine songs are stripped and sparse, Cronin’s steady electric guitar and spectral voice holding center as strings and synthesizers provide wisps of eerie atmosphere. The sound of “Bloodless” is both more visceral and more subliminal than Big Dread Moon, due in equal part to months of intensive home recording by Cronin and Ezra Buchla (Cronin’s husband and violist) and expert mixing by Deerhoof’s John Dieterich (who previously collaborated with Cronin on her 2016 album Came Down a Storm).
Claire and Ezra had been living in Berkeley for less than a year when the pandemic took hold. While living in near-total isolation, one of the worst wildfire seasons in California history began. Cronin explains:
Some days, the air was so toxic that we couldn’t leave the house. Days passed indoors with our air filters going, while the sky outside was orange and dark from morning until dusk. The recording process was almost hallucinatory — I would lose my sense of time in the music’s repetition and the heat of the tiny room where I was playing. The photo on the record cover is from this time.
music won't save you 