Fashion Club Aligns Her Sound and Self on Transformative A Love You Cannot Shake

As petrifying as dramatic changes can be—Fashion Club’s Pascal Stevenson embraced sobriety and a gender transition as she got her band off the ground—when’s a better time to embrace the artistic practice you’ve been itching to try than right now? For years, the Los Angeles-based producer and bassist honed her skills making post-punk as part of Moaning and pushed that sound into dark ambient territory on her first album as Fashion Club. For A Love You Cannot Shake, Stevenson dropped all pretense and embraced the electronics she’d studied for years. Her new sound is a modern art-rock that feels like M83 filtered through a Oneohtrix Point Never lens, or maybe Katie Dey with the curtains drawn a touch further apart. Where many projects feel like they’ve “arrived” when they release an album that carefully adjusts the sounds their early LPs introduced, Fashion Club’s arrival is a much more profound sonic pivot. This glamorous, electronically heightened Fashion Club era feels like the sound which Stevenson has always gestured toward but never allowed herself to embrace. Now that she has, Fashion Club feels matured.

The pyrotechnic opening on “Faith” gives way to a stormy interiority shortly after; Stevenson cycles through disorienting boldness and intense focus with grace. “Forget,” which features fellow master of theatrical yet personal avant-pop Perfume Genius, is the most dipolar on the album. As Stevenson and Mike Hadreas double each other, all instrumentals but a muted keystroke fall away as they repeat: “But held up to the light / I almost find a reason to be kind / When my memory gets wiped / It’s almost like the history isn’t mine.” Stevenson reckons with the past with a new, kinder eye. When she feels herself lean into that kindness, she lets the electronics fly.

This is the first Stevenson project where she’s verbalized her transgender experience; it’s in these songs about time’s passing and questions about what really changes that her gender makes an appearance. Otherwise quotidian inflection points that are a part of daily living, which get their fair share of banal exploration throughout garden-variety indie albums, have more spark when reflected against Stevenson’s personal and artistic changes. “Ghost,” which features fellow Angeleno Jay Som, speaks to a universal experience—lost time and the “what could have beens” of life—that has its own meaning when paired with Stevenson’s experience plus the global experience of lockdown. The underlying dance production is the album’s most kinetic, rich with a kind of anxiety that comes with reflection. It builds to the ultimate realization that there’s no use mourning “lost time” when the reality of how events unfolded led you here in the end.