Claire Cronin: The Bruise

The press release I got from Orindal Records could not have been more explicit: Claire Cronin’s The Bruise is a folk horror album. Of course I looked at the album art and thought, “Yes, a record about witches who cook up babies for dinner.” A smarter person than me could talk about why this photo of Cronin and her baby is so horror-coded. Is it the ornate mirror? Is it the juxtaposition of Cronin’s black and the baby’s white, Cronin’s hair laying on her shoulder like a specter’s? Is there something in the pairing of the striking mirror-shot with the banality of the room’s upper corner forming in the upper edge of the image?

I must say, at first blush The Bruise does sound like what I thought it would. Each song kicks off with guitar that sounds like if a ghost strolled into Guitar Center and started playing with nowhere else to be; the only song with a discernible pulse is Poison Arrow (I’m reminded a bit of hearing Low for the first time, listening to the terrible patience of the guitar on I Could Live in Hope). Cronin’s voice is austere yet quivering. The lyrics are reminiscent of Jason Molina’s ghostly fixations where the same themes come up again and again: burning, dreams, Christmas, angels, hell, darkness, white, and children and the people who care for them. It’s obvious on a first listen that The Bruise is haunted. You get the sense that Cronin can either not let go of something or that something will not let go of her.

But the more one pays attention to what Cronin sings, the more you see how she’s trailblazing new crannies and caverns in what defines “folk horror”. You will not find colorful descriptions of pagan ritual murder, nor English countryside orgy. You’ll find folk horror transposed into the ordinary: the godlessness in a parent’s death (“I saw no angels /Faces like ragdolls”); your environment slowly revealing its anti-life flavor (“Helicopter search beam/ Thought it was the holy ghost/ Oh, that was made to hurt me”); and the things you lean on to give your life meaning – even symbols of death – disappearing in ordinary ways (“But the world never ends in a crash / And this house is not covered in ash”).

That’s not to say this record’s lyrics are always direct. Much of what Cronin sings about is as unknown and personal as the album’s title. There’s no mention of a “bruise” anywhere in these nine songs; we’re left to chew on the idea of a tender discoloration, evidence of some prior violence. In this vein, there have been moments while listening to The Bruise when I wanted to group it with grief records like On the Beach or Carrie & Lowell. But the more I listened to it, the less I heard the grief and the more I heard a more primal isolation. On the album closer, Cronin sings, “Hope is what you had when you were nine.” This is what is meant by folk horror: despair at your world ending, at the way the world looks as it ends, and at the recognition that any possibility of making sense of it disappeared long ago.

The Bruise is out Friday via Orindal Records. Purchase from Bandcamp.