"NESTED IN TANGLES" By Hannah Frances

Hannah Frances is a genre-defying songwriter, composer, and author whose work channels grief, recovery, and emotional instability into bold, dissonant musical and literary forms. Her project Initiate Our Version reflects a heart and mind in flux, blending virtuosic musicianship, fractured structures, and a powerful, unrestrained vocal presence to explore life after the sudden loss of her father.(Folk/Country)

Initiate Our Version - Hannah Frances represents a heart and brain throbbing with trepidation (if you missed her exceptional first book, "The Keeper of the Shepherd," last year), and she conveys her emotional state through a disjointed impression of her recoveries from the sudden, tragic passing of her father, via her second book, Nested in Tangles. The first five minutes of the opening song display an intense showcase of an elite tap dancer tiredly dragging their feet over a creaky floor, and as the feet begin to hit the boards more forcefully than they should, so do the opening guitar notes... After this, various hovering, melodic oohs will try to provide an atmosphere of comfort, however when we pay close attention to these segments, we realize they are just a bit "off," and as with the music of Joan Vallone-Palestrina, the tiniest hint of dissonance has been introduced to the harmonic constructs that she employed.

After that, layers of drums and horns flood the next stage of the song's journey with a high-velocity flurry of fills, dancing around the meter as if they have been released into a pinball machine, and at that point, the saxophone breaks free, creating a cacophony that serves to transition us (again...) away from the frenzy of sound and emotion; within only 1 minute and 40 seconds after the beginning of this song, the musical journey finishes with yet another swerving transition . When Frances’ remarkable, powerful voice makes its entrance and presents us with an almost free-form interpretation of all the concepts of all the songs, the presentation is disorganised and incredibly fast, creating a sense of mania, as if the voice had been captured on a runaway (loud) tape recorder—her declarative proclamation of "I will learn to trust you again" comes to us only through muddled audio, and no understanding of what she said was attainable at this rapid pace-- too fast for comprehension.

Frances is, musically, a builder. Though her first works evoked the early ’70s successes of Joni Mitchell, Nested in Tangles, like Keeper, has more to do with the byzantine delights of Hejira and even more to do with the unapologetic grandeur of Laura Nyro’s visionary world. She is a prog-rock devotee who demanded that the oft-maligned Gentle Giant be namechecked in her press release, an open-tuning acoustic guitarist who understands that her particular approach to playing allows for layer upon layer of sound to rise and shift around her.

Nested in Tangles often sounds enormous and expensive, songs like “Falling From and Further” or “Heavy Light” suggesting an expert orchestral ensemble. But it’s really just Frances, producer Kevin Copeland, and a few friends that occasionally include Grizzly Bear’s Daniel Rossen, all playing multiple instruments and, it seems, often asking one another, “But how can we make this more interesting?” Even the two-minute instrumental “A Body, A Map”—ostensibly just an interlude before the album’s transformative final third—is a wonderland of derring-do. An opening electric drone becomes the foundation for a restless riff-and-rhythm tandem, magnetic and hypnotic in their collective sway. It’s the kind of casually riveting sound a veteran math-rock band might beg to borrow, but it’s only an aside for Frances. Nothing is passive on Nested in Tangles, nothing plain.

Frances' musical performance reflects her own journey and means that the Nested in Tangles album is not merely another example of Frances' talent for musical composition and performance, but it is much more than that. It represents Frances' desire to rise above the pain she has experienced in her life as a child and to become a person who has achieved more than what could have been expected of someone from such a background. The song "Life's Work" acts as the key both lyrically and musically to the album's content. With "Life's Work," Frances presents her most up-beat and catchy song to date. In the chorus, she sings, "Learning to trust in spite of the pain is life's work" and the very last word of the chorus can only be described as an expression of just how difficult it is to learn to trust. In addition, the song "Steady in the Hand" is another powerful example of Frances' lyrical ability.

In "Steady in the Hand," Frances writes a love song dedicated to a person she no longer loves but recognizes that she already knows the limits of that love and that the best things in her life will be in the past. After reaching the crescendo of the song. "Steady in the Hand," Frances looks back on her life. Frances believes that through life and loss we learn what is truly important to us. After the climactic moment in the song, Frances states, "The love breaks the perimeter and softens me again." Within the nine songs included on the album are feelings of anger, disappointment, sadness, and despair. All of these negative emotions are transformed and become part of Frances' journey to discover, recognize, and learn from her own imperfections, while embracing the imperfections of others, thus becoming a better version of herself. Frances experiences a transitional moment when she is able to change her facial expression from an intense frown to a gentle smile momentarily during her performance of "Steady in the Hand".

Mason Morgan