As petrifying as dramatic changes can be—Fashion Club’s Pascal Stevenson embraced sobriety and a gender transition as she got her band off the ground—when’s a better time to embrace the artistic practice you’ve been itching to try than right now? For years, the Los Angeles-based producer and bassist honed her skills making post-punk as part of Moaning and pushed that sound into dark ambient territory on her first album as Fashion Club. For A Love You Cannot Shake, Stevenson dropped all pretense and embraced the electronics she’d studied for years. Her new sound is a modern art-rock that feels like M83 filtered through a Oneohtrix Point Never lens, or maybe Katie Dey with the curtains drawn a touch further apart. Where many projects feel like they’ve “arrived” when they release an album that carefully adjusts the sounds their early LPs introduced, Fashion Club’s arrival is a much more profound sonic pivot. This glamorous, electronically heightened Fashion Club era feels like the sound which Stevenson has always gestured toward but never allowed herself to embrace. Now that she has, Fashion Club feels matured.
The pyrotechnic opening on “Faith” gives way to a stormy interiority shortly after; Stevenson cycles through disorienting boldness and intense focus with grace. “Forget,” which features fellow master of theatrical yet personal avant-pop Perfume Genius, is the most dipolar on the album. As Stevenson and Mike Hadreas double each other, all instrumentals but a muted keystroke fall away as they repeat: “But held up to the light / I almost find a reason to be kind / When my memory gets wiped / It’s almost like the history isn’t mine.” Stevenson reckons with the past with a new, kinder eye. When she feels herself lean into that kindness, she lets the electronics fly.
This is the first Stevenson project where she’s verbalized her transgender experience; it’s in these songs about time’s passing and questions about what really changes that her gender makes an appearance. Otherwise quotidian inflection points that are a part of daily living, which get their fair share of banal exploration throughout garden-variety indie albums, have more spark when reflected against Stevenson’s personal and artistic changes. “Ghost,” which features fellow Angeleno Jay Som, speaks to a universal experience—lost time and the “what could have beens” of life—that has its own meaning when paired with Stevenson’s experience plus the global experience of lockdown. The underlying dance production is the album’s most kinetic, rich with a kind of anxiety that comes with reflection. It builds to the ultimate realization that there’s no use mourning “lost time” when the reality of how events unfolded led you here in the end.
Some songs lean into rock more than others. “Confusion,” with its measured drum cycle and foundation of downstrummed guitar, feels like one of the few songs that directly straddles Stevenson’s prior output and her new direction. The anticapitalist chorus has the spectacle of MGMT with the texture of Yves Tumor: “If I can’t earn what I deserve / Maybe it’s nothing that I’m worth / I get by on delusion.” The pulsating “One Day” imagines a fantasy world free of distress or want, cut forever by the realization that “You’re never enough / Until it’s enough.” Every song started off with a rock-like production, as Stevenson constructed each song’s essential components on her acoustic guitar and piano; there’s a glimpse of that process on “Iceage” when the rest of the production falls away, leaving a hastily recorded Stevenson and her guitar.
“Rotten Mind” showcases Stevenson’s interior palette, as she and Julie Byrne whisper about everyday traitors who feign support but harbor vitriol, even bigotry. Byrne is an inspired choice of collaborator; her rich, spiritual voice has a way of centering everything around her, returning the focus to Stevenson even when the hazy backdrop starts to swell with bloody intensity. The constant guitar line keeps the song balanced, acting like a guide to the high road where Stevenson can watch as her antagonists spiral.
A Love You Cannot Shake is an album that feels like being caught. That can mean being stuck between two worlds, being witnessed at a time when you thought you were safely concealed or being otherwise subsumed into something bigger and stickier than what you were before. Being caught disrupts inertia, forcing some kind of negotiation to figure out what the next step is. Fashion Club offers plenty of next steps, sonically and thematically, on A Love You Cannot Shake, debuting a more dramatic vision than on any prior Stevenson project. Bold production is a risky choice, but Stevenson’s lyrics offer her plenty of space in which she can dwell while curating the electronic flourishes that promise fitting returns. Her aural choices stick like the consistency of her lyrics. A Love You Cannot Shake is precision engineered to present the Pascal Stevenson of today that acknowledges her past without dwelling on it, even sonically, marking a telling step forward.
Devon Chodzin is a Pittsburgh-based critic and urban planner with bylines at Aquarium Drunkard, Stereogum, Bandcamp Daily and more. He lives on Twitter @bigugly.
