"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."
""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."
Hannah Frances follows a 2024 breakthrough about her father's death with Nested in Tangles, an album that confronts maternal absence. The opening five minutes translate a psychosomatic panic into music: a heavy, tap-dancer-like guitar, slightly off wordless oohs, madcap drums and horns, a protesting saxophone, and a scrambled, speeded spoken-word vocal that ends inaudibly. Lyrics and imagery focus on a mother guilty of passive abandonment, with houses and fields burning, years disappearing, and lies and insults functioning as weapons. Frances balances fierce emotional revelation with moments of flippancy as she seeks a new way forward.
Read at Pitchfork
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