Nested in Tangles

Hannah Frances has a nervous head and heart. In case you overlooked that on last year’s absorbing Keeper of the Shepherd, a fitful wonder about reckoning with the early death of her dad, she transforms her psychosomatic state into the first five minutes of its successor, Nested in Tangles. The opening guitar line conjures an elite tap dancer dragging tired feet across an old wooden floor, each hit a little heavier than you think it should be. The wordless oohs that follow and that should feel comforting are slightly off, too, as subtle and striking as Palestrina slipping a whiff of dissonance into a mass. Drums and horns then move in madcap splendor, pinballing around the meter until a saxophone peels off in noisy protest to signal, after only 100 seconds, yet another transition. When Frances’ stunning voice finally arrives for real, delivering a sort of spoken-word summary of the songs and notions to follow, it is scrambled and forever speeding, as if stuck on a runaway tape machine that cannot be stopped. “I believe I can learn to trust again,” she proclaims triumphantly at the end—only you cannot understand her, as her words are too fast, too swallowed by sheets of howling sound. This is how a panic attack feels.

“Keeper was about my daddy issues,” Frances told Hearing Things in a recent interview, “and this one’s about my mommy issues.” These songs ripple with images of a mother guilty of passive abandonment—of not being available or even around when her daughters needed, if not her hand, then at least her heart. Houses and fields burn. Years disappear in gobsmacking loss. Lies and insults are shouted, words doing the work of weapons. But Frances was, in part, being flip: Nested in Tangles is so powerful because it’s about what comes after those mommy-and-daddy issues—about enduring, as she puts it in that prelude, “fault lines that were never my fault” to become something better. During “The Space Between,” her voice lifts in operatic triumph: “I’ve built around the harm.”

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 action mirrors the personal quest that makes Nested in Tangles so compelling, more than just a string of dazzling musical moves or private grievances gone public: to outstrip the woe and grief of her upbringing, to become more than such a life should allow. The record’s skeleton key is “Life’s Work,” the most brisk and hooky tune in Frances’ catalogue. “Learning to trust in spite of it is life’s work,” she offers in the refrain, her voice knotting into a yelp at that last bit, a reminder of just how hard the work of trust can be. Then there’s “Steady in the Hand,” an elegiac love song where Frances realizes she’s already witnessed the limits of said love, that the best has already been. “It takes living and losing to know what matters,” she croons after the climax: “The loving shatters the edges and softens me again.” Disappointment, anger, and dejection dot these nine songs, but this is Frances’ flash of pure grace, as she sees someone else’s failures as an opportunity to improve herself. It’s a scowl shifting at least temporarily into a very soft smile.

There is a moment toward the start of “Falling From and Further” that I think about a lot. The song begins as a slow country gem, with pedal steel washing behind gentle chords and images of Sisyphean sandcastles; it is gorgeous, sad, and easy, a number that would be a great day’s work for a less audacious songwriter. It gets complicated, of course, the drums pushing the tune into anxious sprints, the chords growing jagged and gnarled, the horns demanding that Frances say more. It feels like a half dozen numbers in one, all tucked neatly inside five minutes.

After that first outburst of drums, as the song settles back into a bucolic drift, Frances sings about a very ordinary fear—joining traffic on a somewhat busy highway, the markings on the road limiting her options. “I merge where it hurts,” she sings, her voice suddenly leaden. The act is so mundane that her worry sounds funny, maybe even absurd, but it has stuck with me more than the maternal struggles or life mantras scattered throughout Nested in Tangles. Everything around Frances feels so hard that the simple act of driving seems too demanding, like an obligation she doesn’t know that she has the fortitude to fulfill. Who hasn’t been here, where the world and even its highways become too much to navigate?

She merges, of course, and then the song gallops ahead again. “More than this, I wish to feel it all,” she offers at track’s end, the multitracked vocals surrounding her voice falling away just before she reaches that final phrase. It’s a reminder that only she can do that for herself, and that the ruptures of a past imposed upon her need not make her so nervous much longer. She can be more than that. On Nested in Tangles, she already is.

Hannah Frances: Nested in Tangles

$27 at Rough Trade