Hannah Frances, 'Nested in Tangles' Album Review

Hannah Frances Builds a Shelter Out of Nested in Tangles

When Hannah Frances’ dad died suddenly, she wrote three records’ worth of material but never quite gave herself away. Separation and disappearance, it seemed, defined a loud, redemptive project like Bedrock in 2021. But the Frances whose company we keep now toils in the avant-garde, a delightful, discordant companion to her road-tested, bar-room twang. She’s like Fairport Convention, Joanna Newsom, Jim O’Rourke, and Judee Sill put together; her music deals in ratios of country and Americana yet settles into something less formulaic. Her last record, the grieving, commanding Keeper of the Shepherd, sounded like a debut—a rebirth, penned by somebody asking, “Where do we go once we’ve said goodbye to loss?” In her own words: “I cannot be here without me.” The days of Frances’ summery folk rapidly music fell away; “Bronwyn,” “Husk,” and “Vacant Intimacies” adopted producer Kevin Copeland’s Western arpeggios and jangly, metallic set dressings of vignette instrumentation, ecological imagery, and mythological archetypes. In the transcendence of something personal and cosmic, a past self was shed. A misery conquered. “Hearing the silent song,” Frances beckoned, in the name of a loved one through healing sketches of empty hands, hollow homes, and vacant intimacies. “I want the one who’s gone.”

At the dawn of Nested in Tangles, Frances returns to what doesn’t leave. Incongruent, drop-tuned guitar plucks, splashing cymbals, and flecks of trumpet flare and straighten through the first ninety seconds of the title track. “Living at the edges of rupture, I find solidity in the movement of roots,” a glitchy Frances sirens. “Wrangling up my legs and wrapping around my waist, the truth held steady in the nest between my lungs, beating like wings spanning beyond this life.” In a fractured, swooning holler of horns, looping synths, and strident strums, Frances offers respite: “I believe in the breakage as an opening, as a beginning.” Quickly, the deluge of “Life’s Work” awakens in a descending scale, with noir chords that bound into two contrasting measures: Frances’ vocal decorates the song’s topline, while guitar voicings perforate beneath her. The melody is unwound sideways; Grizzly Bear’s Daniel Rossen clasps piano, strings, and percussion into explosive bursts. Capsized by threads of brass, Frances reconciles with herself, navigating and negotiating blame, tradition, childhood hostility, and fragmented resentment, “meeting in mirrors of deflected projections, learning to trust in spite of it.”

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Nested in Tangles, in its proggy, jazzy, natural abundance, is snared with familial trauma. Frances decorates this bitter unraveling with images of blue herons, sandcastles, children in wildness, lifting fog, flint strikes, and heavy light. But, generously, those images never distract from what pain bodies her memory. “In the blinding lights on the highway, I merge where it hurts,” she sings on “Falling From and Further,” as feathers of pedal steel talk in conversation with her humid, bending guitar, and tempos amble between double-time beats and simple structures. “Shoulders narrow guiding, brevity of the turning. The fear of everyone leaving keeps me leaving first, when my world grows smaller.” Whatever passage of grief tailed Frances during Keeper of the Shepherd has now infiltrated all of her, in a labyrinth spanning thirty years, in youth now fettered with decay. And her language fills even the most meta-physical ideas with splendored visuals.

“Surviving You” contends with this, in anxious, split-screen storytelling and noisy, pulled-apart rock transmissions. Frances sings in the first verse, “I learned from you, how to leave, how to fight hard, how to pull apart and push away. Waving through a closed window, waiting to be mirrored back, refract the light left on,” and, in the afterglow of a homesick chorus, ignites with a drifting, dimming smoke: “How you hurt us to feel stronger, in the wrong, doing the wrong, smoldering as the rage lingers longer. There’s nothing more to give toward forgivenes, when there is no willingness to understand.” Like “Life’s Work,” the acts of “Surviving You” exist on tangential planes, colliding with each other but never quite cohering, like some out-of-sync taunt where Frances massages herself into minimalist marshes that expel into altars of pastoral maximalism. Twice she wades into Copeland’s ambient spaces on Nestled in Tangles, in “Beholden To” and “A Body, A Map,” employing vocoder and soups of deviating tempos, breathy, augmented synths, tinny guitars, and rattling percussion. In someone else’s hands, these tracks are causeways between suites; in Frances and Copeland’s shared potency, you can hear a darkness begin to unglue.

And when Frances aches, we ache. “Steady in the Hand” and “The Space Between” tarry there, first in gentle attachment (“I want to give the best of me to you, the life rising through into my arms wrapped around your shoulders, unfolding again”) and then in redemption (“I wish you had been there, wish you were more aware of me. In this body, there’s a heart beating. And it’s my heart and it’s your heart, that I’ve needed. I needed better”). But Nested in Tangles is not about forgiveness, it’s about “let[ting] it live in the space between what’s gone and what’s given.” What “it” is is summoned by the yarn of the record’s last idea, when Frances releases her past into an unburdening. “I am still a child finding flowers, unfurling forms and falling further into laughter,” she surrenders, before reclaiming: “I am still cradling sand, steady in the hand, I am the love lasting. And there I am, a fragile being in the belly of your body.”

The fenced-in harm across Nestled in Tangles makes for a difficult listen. Even the album’s conclusion suggests that death and tragedy have inescapable perminance. Frances never reaches for catchiness, only that which soothes the bedlam written within her. “The ways I’ve carried the weight of your absence, reaching for you when I needed you,” she speaks to us, in a spoken-word comedown draped with the sounds of chattering children and music-box hums. “And I will keep reaching, to live here, in the heavy.” The idea of what’s gone and what’s given is a stubborn, angry vibration. Sometimes Frances’ knotty, faraway abstractions (“I reach through limbic estuaries, casting shadows along the entropy and chaos of memory”) compress into clearness and departure (“If there is a way out, let it be through me”). But sometimes they don’t. If Keeper of the Shepherd argued for loss prompting growth and newness, then Nestled in Tangles concedes that life-spanning hurt is not to be defeated, only transformed. I return to one sentence in particular, which seems to fall out of Frances like an unhurried tome, when I am desperate for brightness: “It takes living and losing to know what matters.” From the clatter of taut, orchestral trappings emerges a stillness. Nestled in Tangles, unclothed and adrift, shelters in the necessary.

Read our recent feature with Hannah Frances here.

Matt Mitchell is Paste’s music editor, reporting from their home in Los Angeles.

Hannah Frances Builds a Shelter Out of Nested in Tangles

Paste Pick: In the images of life-spanning hurt on her sixth album, the Vermont singer-songwriter never reaches for catchiness, only the discordant, zagging prog-folk that soothes the bedlam written within her.