Hannah Frances: Keeper of the Shepherd Album Review

But for much of Keeper of the Shepherd, Frances’ intuitive instrumental patterns are only springboards for uncanny song structures, methodically built by Frances and producer and multi-instrumentalist Kevin Copeland. There is more than a touch of genteel prog around its folk core, situating Frances somewhere among Joanna Newsom, Jeff Buckley, and Fleet Foxes. Opener “Bronwyn” rises and falls, jerks and jumps as if on some ramshackle carousel, always about to slip into hell or ascend into heaven. Tangled wisps of saxophone curl around the dub-like strut of closer “Haunted Landscape, Echoing Cave,” all of it blurring into a paisley dream after a brief cool-jazz interlude. Frances suffered a bout of writer’s block before these songs arrived in a rush; their scope and flexibility are gifts of endurance, of sticking with it.

That lesson is written into every song here, as Frances contends with the long grip of grief and her belief that it will steadily loosen. Frances returns to a small set of images—caves, shepherds and their sheep, ribs and rivers—repeatedly across these 37 minutes, allowing her to make a map of her own progress. In “Bronwyn,” it’s loss that rips through her chest, expanding her rib cage until her body warps like the distorted drums beneath her; two songs later, in “Woolgathering,” she is breathing in a new love and life. “Give me time to free my lungs,” she sings, like Vashti Bunyan in an electrostatic haze, “the ribs are loosening.” Frances says she often sequences her albums in the order in which she wrote the songs; witness her inching forward into her own life.

Frances might come across like some precious emissary of sylvan New Age yuppiedom, trapped somewhere between a favorite yoga studio in town and a preferred farmstand in the country. She is, after all, a self-described “movement artist” who makes earnest music videos amid lush evergreen landscapes and does interpretive dance to her own songs in the near-dark on the Olympic Peninsula. “As my writing is inextricable from my kinship with the land,” she wrote recently in her newsletter, “I weave ecological imagery and archetype to recount my personal mythology more expansively, more richly.”