Angelica Babiera | Arts Editor
Featured Image: The sweet-sounding rhythms and melodies strung together in the songs will make people feel calm, mirroring the season’s ambiance. | Courtesy of Pexels
It’s that time of the year again—the nights are getting longer and colder, classic Halloween movies are screening on every television channel, and it’s the perfect time for chilled out hangout sessions with family and friends.
Mellow albums like Sabrina Claudio’s About Time is one of the best ones to listen to during the soothing autumn season. The sweet-sounding rhythms and melodies that Claudio strings together in her songs will make people feel calm, mirroring the season’s ambience.
The Los Angeles singer pieced an R&B and Soul album that opens with a monologue by Claudio, who metaphorized herself to a rose, ending with her deciding whether or not she should get back together with her ex. About Time is not only a peaceful and a suitable “chill” album, but it also discusses the theme of losing oneself whilst in the process of loving someone else.
Claudio begins with her proclaiming self-love in the monologue. The life of a rose is a metaphor for the struggles and challenges that she experiences. Despite her shortcomings, Claudio still manages to accept her flaws and grow as a person.
By the second song, however, Claudio finds herself in a new relationship, giving her the idea that loving her new partner defines who she is as a person. It conveys how she instantly loses herself and her own self-love, so that she could focus on loving her significant other.
As a whole, About Time focuses on the self-destruction that is caused by Claudio’s new partnership. By the end, Claudio begins to realize her mistakes, and the destructive relationship that she was a part of. She focuses on trying to love herself again before returning back to her partner.
“You can really feel her emotions and passion with every word and lyric that she sings,” says John Mercado, a fourth-year Marketing student at York. “I also found that a lot of her songs are very sultry and seductive in nature, but have an underlying message of self-empowerment. Overall, I feel that she is a true artist, and has a clear message for her intended audience.”
The whole album’s atmosphere is very mellow and soft, while the theme is very powerful and relatable for most. However, Claudio’s soft voice and soothing beats are considerably mediocre R&B tones. She doesn’t do anything that the majority of people have already heard of.
Caren Badtke, a York graduate student, explains her thoughts on the singer: “Claudio’s aspirations remind me of artists like FKA Twigs or Aaliyah. While Claudio doesn’t seem to have perfected the craft of letting silences speak for themselves, as the former artists have—though she certainly tries to—the singer finds herself on the fringe between edgy and smooth. The way she conducts herself, like her femme fatale aesthetic, could make her a Tumblr-generation pop star—but the end, the result of her music is all but smooth playbook R&B.”
About Time vividly portrays a relatable kind of love through the typical sounds of R&B, having been used from several other artists before its debut. Claudio has potential and room for growth as an R&B artist, however, she could benefit from creating her own style. Despite this, the album is, without a doubt, relaxing and well-fit for the autumn season.
