Following her acclaimed 2024 album Keeper of the Shepherd, the Vermont-based composer, vocalist, guitarist, and poet returns with a truly entrancing, beautiful wild garden of tumbling polyrhythmic experimental folk-jazz-prog, packed with complex stories and emotions grown through finger-picked guitar, wind, brass and string arrangements. As well as longtime collaborator Kevin Copeland, she is was also joined by Daniel Rossen of Grizzly Bear to produce and arrange two of the standouts, Life’s Work and The Space Between. The evocative, otherworldly opener and title track sets up a dynamic, long instrumental opening, until her spoken voice presents a distorted spoke voice with vocal harmonies on top, describing how: “I reach through limbic estuaries / Casting shadows along the entropy and chaos of memory / I reach to the limits of this tangled landscape / My body holds the history as a map/ Disparate narratives, oscillations, aerial parts and unrevealed roots.” This, and the final track, Heavy Light, are spoken word and instrument bookends of the album. There’s a rich tapestry of influences, from contemporary avant-garde composers such as Steve Reich and Phillip Glass, as well as 70s progressive rock bands Gentle Giant and Yes, but Frances feels utterly in own wavelength here, a twisting, weaving, evocative world of twisting musical vines.
Life’s Work is a true standout, mixing intricate finger-picking rich, catchy brass band backing, and gorgeous, poetic vocals describing anxious, dream-like memories in which she aches for her younger self, singing: “Reconcile the child through hostile family/rupture is tradition, born into dissonance”, and vivid, emotional lines such as: “Blue herons flew over our house as it burned down / anger lingering on in all that's left of it has left and gone / nowhere and everywhere like edges of water …” Reaching for other comparisons, Frances has occasionally echoes of Fiona Apple and Joanna Newsom. The fabulous Falling From And Further slips between melancholy folk and country into galloping, more joyous passages.
Beholden To, is a gentle number of twittering bird field recordings, violin and guitar, with eccentric warbles of woodwind. Steady in The Hand, followed by A Body, A Map, then Surviving You continues this gentler, but also experimental passage through album, all differently beautiful and exploratie. The latter sees Frances recollecting a past of harm, lamenting: “How you hurt us to feel stronger / in the wrong, doing the wrong / smouldering as the rage lingers longer”. The aforementioned, deliciously beautiful The Space Between a sweeping exhale of recognition of life's cascade between heaviness and light. Frances sings, “I don’t forgive, I let it live in the space between / what’s gone and what’s given / if there is another way let it move me, if there is a way out let it be through me”. Frances seeks healing outside of forgiveness and perhaps it is indeed lying in the space between. It is followed by the closer Heavy Light, with flurry of strings, gentle guitar and a sound sample of children playing. “And I will keep reaching”, she promises. “To live here, in the heavy, in the light / I am the heart I've needed, and I feel it all.” Ethereal, transportive, gorgeously alternative, richly rewarding work by supremely intelligent and gifted artist. Out on Fire Talk.
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