Frances Chang | Psychedelic Anxiety | Ramp Local | February 2024
Psychedelic Anxiety, the second album from Brooklyn-based DIY musician Frances Chang, is dreamlike in a way that we often misattribute to cloudy, lazily drifting tunes that don’t really go anywhere. To “dream,” instead, is to look inward, intensely and confusedly, and hope to glean some small truth within the muddled recesses of your mind. You follow a thread, and it splits, then splits repeatedly, forming frayed webs so complex and intricate that they seem formless. Chang’s brand of “slacker prog” – a term that grossly undersells the tapestry of sounds, recording techniques, and songwriting modes on display here – isn’t simply about introspection; it reflects the pathways and the process, unafraid to chase down a dead end if it means working towards a moment of clarity.
“Spiral in Houston” sees Chang immediately enter the deep end, making it precisely one line in before her creaky, windchime-like acoustic guitar melody turns a corner into something more deliberate, throbbing with dire purpose. A series of vocal self-harmonies dip in and out as if Chang is splitting herself apart, testing to see if she can put herself back together correctly. By the second verse, she’s adding glitched-out, bubbling synths that sputter like a busted sprinkler system and a drum loop that comes and goes as it pleases. Chang tangibly adds, subtracts, or twists something within the four-minute track probably a dozen times, but the impression of improv is deliberate: she does revisit ideas, sweeping a bit of psychic debris off each time, revealing new details.
“Eye Land” and “Ya a Mirage” are a little easier to grasp, but relativity is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. “Eye Land” opens with a simple alt-country twang, quickly giving way to stretched, slightly out-of-sync harmonies once again before disrupting the calm with heavy power chords and splashy cymbals. It splits the difference between the lethargy of early Liz Phair and the sporadic surrealism of last year’s Being Dead record. “Ya a Mirage” aligns with fellow Brooklyn-based avant-rockers Dirty Projectors, particularly 2007’s Rise Above. It’s a broken, buzzing mess that forms more solidly after the first verse, straddling the line between stoner and space rock, while wordless, angelic vocal lines preside over Chang’s slightly nasally verses. “Darkside,” where Chang reflects upon the aftermath of seeing Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite, is still all verses and doesn’t adhere to the typical rules of pop music, but it does follow along a more traditional melodic loop and is easily Psychedelic Anxiety’s most “normal” cut. No completely left-field bells and whistles: the allure here is the deep rhythm mix and jazzy drum breaks courtesy of Liza Winter.
And the rest is just off-the-rails. “Sci-Fi Soap Opera” is the first of two spoken word pieces. “I keep you close because I can’t focus on our edges / I think we’ve grown irreversibly together and / It’s too late to separate without cutting some of me out / I struggle to fix the problem in you that is really in me,” Chang self-therapizes over an instrumental that recalls Angelo Badalamenti’s most lovingly cheesy work. “I Was Afraid” is a depressive rewrite of Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive,” instead emphasizing childhood fear, her familial trauma, and how it’s affected how she interacts with others now as an adult. Michael Sachs’ woodwinds swallow her up: it’s like a dirge for Chang’s ego death. Chang builds “Body of the Lightning” around a field recording of a thunderstorm and returns to the late-’80s/early-’90s daytime TV synth patches to polish it off.
Closer “Rate My Aura” encompasses everything that works (and sometimes doesn’t) about Psychedelic Anxiety. The synths loop like an evil Jack-in-the-Box before Winter and bassist Andrea Schiavelli kick in with a steady punk groove (it’s very tempting to continue comparing Chang to New York artists, and here we go again, it’s Patti Smith this time). Chang’s stream-of-consciousness poetry lands upon wise insight (“The inner knows, the outer is buried in ignorance / I am your dreams and I try to send letters / My first language is symbol / I don’t speak non-secret”) about as often as it trips on a weed-induced gaffe you laugh at after sobering up (“If you really think about it / We don’t really have that much control over ourselves / I mean we can try, but I guess what I’m trying to say is / We don’t have control over / What we don’t yet have control over”). And that’s not a bad thing; it’s just the cost of introspection. You could make a valid argument that Psychedelic Anxiety needs an editor, but you might be missing the point. Like a dream, sometimes the symbols lead to profound truths, and some are dumb as hell. But it’s all liberating, all worthwhile, and all you. Follow it and see where it leads.
Note: This review was originally published in Rantipole.
Travis Shosa is a writer from Spring, TX. They are the EIC and managing editor of Dodo Eraser. Their creative writing is featured in Stanchion, Maudlin House, HAD, Bending Genres, fifth wheel press, HAWKEYE, Some Words and lots of other cool places. They have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and Best Small Fictions. Their journalism has been featured in Pitchfork, Bandcamp Daily, The Line of Best Fit, PAPER, Spectrum Culture, and others.
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