by Devon Chodzin (@biguly)
What are the contours of today’s psychedelic music? It can be hard to pinpoint exactly where, say, psychedelia ends and experimentation begins. On one level, delineating borders between these two worlds feels valuable because so much contemporary bedroom pop feels like downtempo psych, offering a kind of youth-focused easy listening. That said, psychedelic art is a wide-ranging practice seeking to capture the experience of chemically-altered consciousness – the shape of one’s psychedelic trip is unique from person to person. For New York’s Frances Chang, psychedelia can be found in the crosshairs of art rock, freak folk, bedroom punk, and more in a soupy mess of modified consciousness. On her first full-length under her own name, support your local nihilist, all those influences coagulate into an unapologetically honest and intense expression of Chang’s irreplicable vantage point.
Frances Chang brought on Johnson City-based collaborator Hunter Davidsohn to help cultivate the weighty, analog sound that breeds support your local nihilist’s intensity, even with the sometimes silly amalgamation of instruments seemingly manifesting out of thin air only to crawl back into hiding. Whatever instrument can be strummed, plucked, tickled, or otherwise coaxed into creating some unusual sound to back Chang evokes an altered state – are you really hearing that?
Hazy guitars churn on album opener “p much deranged” with lo-fi charm that grows more ominous as more and more instruments cry out for help. Chang’s layered vocals lead the procession through the chaos towards the confessional mantra she releases. Subsequent song “flower childs” is similarly lo-fi, with tape-fried vocals and guitar sitting prominently. On an ad hoc basis, the clang of a child’s percussive keyboard add a homemade twinkle, bedroom-pop style. Chang increases the fidelity on single “i quit cigs,” a vulnerable song about the travails of nicotine cessation that ends on a gentle, forward-facing note.
The title track has a punk edge that suits the breakup Chang is narrating. When she sings, “But this thing with you brings out my nihilism / Is anything real,” it’s almost funny. It’s also a refreshing way to frame nihilism at a time when it feels like nihilism is often used by the powerful to justify repressive control – for Chang, nihilism is more like a state of surrender. Is anything real? Maybe, but life is, generally, no more than what it appears in front of us. Maybe there’s more potential in seeing life for the simple fact of itself as opposed to anything illusory or grandiose.
On tracks like “headless” and “intimacy,” where Chang’s multi-tracked vocals take precedence, nothing remains illusory for very long. As much as psychedelia might feel reliant on illusion (or worse, delusion), Chang prefers to draw that altered state out of her instrumental arrangements and challenging melodies. Her voice bounces and races forward with the avant-pop sensibilities of Fiona Apple and Mitski while guitars, percussion, and unique instruments offer a reverb scramble. This blend of art pop and psych rock is catchy and difficult at once, drawing one in without coherent expectations of what’s next. There are surprises at every turn, particularly among the tempo changes in “intimacy.”
With the hypnotic harmonies of a hymn, “full moon after purgatory” is the kind of dreamy adventure that serves as the ideal penultimate track on such an off-kilter record. The record’s closer, “solo tripping in the deathverse,” portrays Chang in a state of singular concentration, emotions escalating inside, until she finally releases all of that baggage and embraces the nihilistic future ahead of her. The ending lines, “I am what is left, still intact, all dark energy / still glowing from the mystery / a single spade, when I release / layers mistaken for parts of me,” speak to Chang’s withering of excess into the unencumbered, potentially powerful local nihilist. It’s a fitting end for a record whose psychedelic improvisation feels so unpredictable and haphazard that it releases into a simple state that is, paradoxically, positively negative.