It feels an indictment to label someone’s work as gloomy, as though it’s something that happens and not something that’s chosen. But on her latest album, Sabbatical, Rosa Anschütz leans into goth as a genre in a deliberate way. And it’s not only because she features the cawing of crows on a track. Sabbatical is deeply atmospheric with a gloom often enveloping it. While opening track ‘Eva’ is awash with swampy dissonance, it is a misdirect, for the gauzy effects and layers of wordless vocals hide the sharper edged sounds lower in songs.
Anschütz’s previous work touched on a variety of electronic genres from a dark folktronica to vibrant techno, now replaced by the hard thud of her post-punk bass lines and a voice pulled from a place deep in her chest. The goth aesthetic manifests in the way she plays repetitive, plodding rhythms on the piano like a morose harbinger. On ‘Like Oxblood’, the piano keeps pace with her defiant refrain (“why do I feel guilty?”) a line she hammers in among a flood of background vocals and layered distortion.
Anschütz knows how to harness repetition in her lyrics to great rhetorical effect, particularly as a chanted outro. It’s what takes the song ‘Fire Lily’ from a ghostly minimalism akin to Marissa Nadler’s work to a cloud-clearing rallying cry. The effectiveness lies in how easily she modulates her voice, from the airy and new agey to compressed and steely. But for her most pointed lyrics, it’s either through spoken word or a half-spoken singing; it’s how she moves narratives forward and how she persuades, defends, and argues.
This style reinforces a world-weariness in her lyrics, not a tone of boredom but of an aching familiarity with certain unpleasant scenarios. The mundane cautioning of a friend not to lose herself in a relationship on ‘Not a Myth’ stands in contrast to the implied film noir violence of ‘Burlap’. It’s all decidedly femme coded, alluding to particular pressures and emotional expectations imposed on women. It feels like the tension of the couplet “As I pretended to unlock my feelings / You are over-eating” could only describe a relationship between women, whether we are talking about literal or emotional consumption.
She is just as capable of channeling that defiant spirit for positivity. Though Sabbatical takes us on a frequently melancholic journey, Anschütz chooses fittingly-titled album closer ‘Swan Song’ to encourage others. “There’s always a way,” she insists, a potent reminder of why it’s worth trying to navigate through the gloom.
