Review: Hannah Frances – Keeper of the Shepherd

Genres: Avant-Folk, Progressive Rock, Chamber Jazz (Clean vocals)
Recommended for fans of: Joanna Newsom, Devin Townsend & Ché Aimee Dorval’s Casualties of Cool, Iamthemorning
Country: Illinois, USA
Review by: Christopher
Release date: 1 March 2024

I find myself more and more taken with folk, having got into some Joanna Newsom and David Crosby (and his various collaborators) recently, or going back to my ongoing flirtations with the vaguely folkish alterna-rock of City and Colour, as well as the more overtly prog and metal interpretations of the sound: the lilting flavours of blackened Borknagar, the manic fusion of Subterranean Masquerade, and the new age meets prog meets americana of Casualties of Cool. Something about the authentic grit of folk—its communion with the pastoral, its reckoning with the vicissitudes of life—always pulls me back. 

Hailing from Illinois, Hannah Frances is a solo folk artist working with a series of session musicians, and Keeper of the Shepherd, her sophomore album, resides on the folk side, not the prog side of the spectrum—drawing from Newsom and Joni Mitchell rather than from the likes of Orphaned Land. That’s right, I’m once again asking you – Bernie meme style – to step outside your comfort zones. With a rich timbre and precise vibrato, poetic lyrics that eschew stanza structures in favour of emotional streams-of-consciousness, a distinct fingerstyle rooted in the open tunings of folk (for those more unusual harmonic resonances) but embracing polyrhythmic complexities dazzling in their nuance and strangeness, Keeper of the Shepherd may not be your traditional prog rock, but it’s unabashedly progressive in outlook.

“Bronwyn”, for example, features characteristically gorgeous vocals, but underneath the guitar riff is impossibly intricate—I think there’s a lot of 6/4 and 5/4 being moved around in strange ways but trying to work it out gave me a headache; no wonder it took a year for Frances to write it. Distorted guitar moves in around the edges as the song pushes in post-rock fashion to its jangling latter reaches, sounding like the halfway point between Porcupine Tree and Mazzy Star in these moments. The somewhat jaunty mute-heavy rhythm of the title track, meanwhile, belies the fact that Frances is crooning about the death of her father, a grief that suffuses much of the record. Soft pedal steel laments in the background like a mournful train call in the night, and the vocal harmonies hit a layered crescendo, a dozen voices raised in pain, the instruments succumbing to grim resignation as the song doesn’t conclude so much as falls apart. 

At some junctures, Frances seems to tickle around the edges of homage: “Floodplain’s” main guitar motif is redolent of the progression in “Blackbird” by The Beatles, but Frances’ vocal melodies move in counterpoint, diverging and converging with the rhythm as brief battalions of strings attack at the edges before a sustained assault on the song’s mid-section. Meanwhile, the languid chords of “Husk” recall Erik Satie’s “Gymnopédie No.1”, as voice and violin perform to one another, driving to a complex layering of harmonies that build to a choral, funereal climax. 

Woodwinds, provided by Hunter Diamond, play around the margins on many of the tracks, as on “Vacant Intimacies” which crescendos post-rock style while saxophones noodle away above with jazzlike disregard for theoretical concerns, and closer “Haunted Landscape, Echoing Cave” which, after the rhythmically distinct verses and choruses, explodes into a kaleidoscopic chamber jazz instrumental, capping off the album with a sense of fullness, as though the entire record had been leading to this more complete sound. A resolution of sorts, a new start, light at the end of mourning. These two may well be my favourite tracks, the more reserved and stripped back middle third of the album admittedly not really matching my more maximalist prog fancies, but I’d be hard pressed to find any real problems with Keeper of the Shepherd; Frances has her vision under perfect control. 

No, this isn’t your traditional prog rock, but Keeper of the Shepherd absolutely deserves the ear of the more folk-minded fans who lurk around our site. Composed with a perfect balance of complexity and melody, lovingly mixed, and with turbid emotions roiling freely, this is an album whose intricacies and excellent guest musicians are perfectly suited to evoke the record’s central spiritual burdens. As the evenings draw out and hope begins to eke out a place in the cold soil, let Hannah Frances shepherd you into the spring. 

Recommended tracks: Bronwyn; Vacant Intimacies; Haunted Landscape, Echoing Cave
You may also like: Mingjia, Lack the Low, Courtney Swain, Evan Carson
Final verdict: 8/10

Related links: Bandcamp | Spotify | Official Website | Facebook | Instagram | YouTube

Label: Ruination Record Co. – Bandcamp

Hannah Frances is:
– Hannah Frances (music, lyrics, guitar, vocals, production)