“I believe in the breakage as an opening/ As a beginning/ I believe there is a way through/ I believe I can learn to trust again and again and again.”
The closing words of Nested in Tangles’ title track set out its terms: trust fractured, trust attempted, trust endlessly rehearsed. They tell you something about Hannah Frances’s poise as a writer, but they don’t quite prepare you for the force of the music that follows. American composer, guitarist and poet, Frances has been building her own twilight world piece by piece, most recently with last year’s Keeper of the Shepherd. Written almost immediately afterwards, Nested in Tangles is darker and denser, shaped by the resurfacing of family trauma.
Recorded in Vermont with long-time collaborator Kevin Copeland, and joined by Daniel Rossen of Grizzly Bear on two tracks, the album inhabits the past rather than circling it. Estrangement and betrayal are the gravitational pull, and Frances doesn’t sidestep them. Her songs carry their contradictions intact: fragile one moment, bristling the next
‘Nested in Tangles’ intricate, disorienting overture shifts us into an uncertain space where the work of remembering can begin. Next, ‘Life’s Work’ frames its bittersweet reflections in orchestral bursts and trombone, a piece that teeters uneasily between whimsy and ache. On ‘Surviving You’ she spits, “How you hurt us to feel stronger / in the wrong, doing the wrong,” while repeating “homesick” until it feels like a purpled bruise pressed too often. The overlapping vocals grow claustrophobic, the saxophone and bass clarinet scrape against the guitars. This is confrontation, not catharsis.
Like the memories they draw on, these songs rarely move in straight lines. They loop back on themselves, unravel, flare up and subside. ‘Falling From and Further,’ one of the quieter tracks, builds itself up before dissolving just as quickly. ‘Steady in the Hand’ catches on small flashes of tenderness: “nowhere were we so close than the barren field burned and / buried in the clearing, bruised knees bleeding,” but they arrive tangled up with bitterness. Devotion and betrayal run side by side, though what remains loudest is the trace of love.
Musically, Frances hovers at the edges of genre. There are traces of folk and Americana, a bit of prog’s fondness for complexity, and the looseness of jazz that constantly destabilises whatever structure is in place. The songs don’t feel neatly built so much as left to sprawl. At times, the weight of it threatens to collapse, as on ‘Beholden To,’ but her voice cuts through, always returning to the blunt insistence: this happened, I lived it. However dense the arrangements, she never gets lost in them.
Lyrically, Frances will occasionally spell things out — “the fear of everyone leaving / keeps me leaving first” — but more often she turns to nature to articulate what might otherwise remain unspeakable. Blue herons pass over a burning house, detached yet haunting. Roots coil around the body, anger drifts like the edges of water, and flowers still open, small signs of renewal in the shadow of loss. These motifs broaden the frame with the songs reaching beyond family history into something more elemental. Contradiction here isn’t presented as a problem to be solved, but simply as the condition of living, every break carrying, as she puts it, a “lesson in forgetting.”
The album culminates with ‘The Space Between’. Breathing in and out around Rossen’s arrangement, its pauses carry the invisible weight of trauma as time bends, before breaking open into Frances’ voice. The tension feels true to experience, echoing the spirals of thought, the sudden loops and detours of a mind pulled between past and present. Resisting closure, she offers a harder, unresolved kind of reckoning: “I don’t forgive, I let it live in the space between / what’s gone and what’s given.” That refusal to “overcome” the past gives the album more force than any orchestral crescendo. It isn’t bitterness, but an admission that forgiveness isn’t always possible, and as she sings elsewhere “learning to trust in spite of it
is life’s work.” Instead of a neat finish, closing track ‘Heavy Light’ presses the point further: “I will keep reaching / to live here, in the heavy, in the light.”
Nested in Tangles voices what many keep unspoken: the knot of love and anger in family, the ache of distance, the stubborn glimmer of affection inside hurt. Frances never reduces these experiences to neat narrative, and the result is as demanding as it is unforgettable. Like Mount Eerie’s A Crow Looked at Me or Lingua Ignota’s Sinner Get Ready, it leaves you shaken but unable to turn away.
‘Nested in Tangles’ is released 10th October via Fire Talk
