{"id":309860,"date":"2025-10-17T04:48:13","date_gmt":"2025-10-17T04:48:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/309860\/"},"modified":"2025-10-17T04:48:13","modified_gmt":"2025-10-17T04:48:13","slug":"hannah-frances-nested-in-tangles-album-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/309860\/","title":{"rendered":"Hannah Frances: Nested in Tangles Album Review"},"content":{"rendered":"

Frances is, musically, a builder. Though her first works evoked the early \u201970s successes of Joni Mitchell<\/a>, Nested in Tangles, like Keeper, has more to do with the byzantine delights of Hejira<\/a> and even more to do with the unapologetic grandeur of Laura Nyro<\/a>\u2019s visionary world<\/a>. She is a prog-rock devotee who demanded that the oft-maligned Gentle Giant<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

Nested in Tangles often sounds enormous and expensive, songs like \u201cFalling From and Further\u201d or \u201cHeavy Light\u201d suggesting an expert orchestral ensemble. But it\u2019s really just Frances, producer Kevin Copeland, and a few friends that occasionally include Grizzly Bear<\/a>\u2019s Daniel Rossen<\/a>, all playing multiple instruments and, it seems, often asking one another, \u201cBut how can we make this more interesting?\u201d Even the two-minute instrumental \u201cA Body, A Map\u201d\u2014ostensibly just an interlude before the album\u2019s transformative final third\u2014is 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\u2019s the kind of casually riveting sound a veteran math-rock band might beg to borrow, but it\u2019s only an aside for Frances. Nothing is passive on Nested in Tangles, nothing plain.<\/p>\n

Frances\u2019 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\u2019s skeleton key is \u201cLife\u2019s Work,\u201d the most brisk and hooky tune in Frances\u2019 catalogue. \u201cLearning to trust in spite of it is life\u2019s work,\u201d 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\u2019s \u201cSteady in the Hand,\u201d an elegiac love song where Frances realizes she\u2019s already witnessed the limits of said love, that the best has already been. \u201cIt takes living and losing to know what matters,\u201d she croons after the climax: \u201cThe loving shatters the edges and softens me again.\u201d Disappointment, anger, and dejection dot these nine songs, but this is Frances\u2019 flash of pure grace, as she sees someone else\u2019s failures as an opportunity to improve herself. It\u2019s a scowl shifting at least temporarily into a very soft smile.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Frances is, musically, a builder. Though her first works evoked the early \u201970s successes of Joni Mitchell, Nested…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":309861,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[1939,171,975,67,132,68,1940],"class_list":{"0":"post-309860","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-music","8":"tag-albums","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-music","11":"tag-united-states","12":"tag-unitedstates","13":"tag-us","14":"tag-web"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115387701982335936","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/309860","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=309860"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/309860\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/309861"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=309860"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=309860"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=309860"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}