But for many of Guardian of the Shepherd, Frances' intuitive instrumental patterns are only springboards for strange song structures, methodically crafted by Frances and producer and multi-instrumentalist Kevin Copeland. There's more than a hint of genteel programming around its folksy core, placing Frances somewhere between Joanna Newsom, Jeff Buckley and Fleet Foxes. Opener 'Bronwyn' rises and falls, jolts and jumps like on some tumultuous merry-go-round, always ready to slide into hell or ascend to heaven. Entwined sax chimes curl around the monochromatic beam of closer “Haunted Landscape, Echoing Cave,” all of which blurs into a paisley dream after a brief cool-jazz interlude. Frances suffered a period of writer's block before these songs arrived in a hurry. Their range and flexibility are gifts of endurance, of obsessing over it.
That lesson is written into every song here, as Frances grapples with grief's long grip 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 in 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 ribs until her body contorts like the distorted drums beneath her. Two songs later, on “Woolgathering”, he breathes new love and life. “Give me time to free my lungs,” she sings, like Vashti Bunyan in an electrostatic fog, “ribs loosen.” Frances says she often ranks her albums in the order in which she wrote the songs. witness her coming forward in her life.
Frances might seem like some precious emissary of sylvan New Age yuppiedom, caught somewhere between a beloved yoga studio in the city and a favored farm in the country. She is, after all, a self-proclaimed “movement artist” who does serious music videos amidst lush green landscapes and dances interpretatively her own songs in almost dark in the Olympic Peninsula. “As my writing is inseparable from my affinity with the land,” he said wrote recently in her newsletter, “I weave ecological imagery and archetypes to tell my personal mythology more expansively, more richly.”
from our partners at https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/hannah-frances-the-keeper-of-the-shepherd/