The title of Aoife Nessa Frances’ debut album, Land of No Junction, is the product of a happy accident: While speaking to her guitarist/co-producer Cian Nugent about his childhood travels in Wales, she misheard his reference to a train station named Llandudno Junction. But that fortuitous error says a great deal about the Irish songwriter’s methodology: Land of No Junction abounds with deceptively serene serenades and sleights of hand. Drawing from an eclectic array of record-collector reference points—’60s psych-pop, ’70s art-rock, Tropicália, avant-garde orchestration—the album puts you on familiar footing before gradually changing the scenery, blurring the line between the real and the imagined.
When we first meet Frances, she’s pondering the passage of time through the image of withered flora on “Geranium”—a song that demonstrates how patient, attentive nurturing can spur splendorous growth. What begins as a skeletal drum-machine beat eventually yields a melange of rippling guitar lines, hypnotic organ hums, and backmasked swirls, as if Frances were trying to harvest a Spiritualized song inside a terrarium. It’s the first of many sublime musical mutations, but the uncanny allure of Land of No Junction has as much to do with the surprising ways Frances’ lyrics shift from cryptic musings to clear-eyed critique.
Her voice shines like a headlight in fog, luminous and ambiguous in equal measure—though, like fellow pastoral poet Cate Le Bon, her placid diction belies a more restless spirit. “Geranium” and its follow-up, “Blow Up,” share a similar psych-folk melody, but take it to dramatically different places, both musically and topically. Written a few years before Ireland legalized abortion in 2018, “Blow Up” is less an impassioned defense of a woman’s right to choose than a comment on the more mundane ways patriarchy exerts its control. “I’m about to lose my mind,” Frances sings, before concluding, “Tired of being human/Lesser than man.” Her tone is more resigned than enraged, but the increasingly antsy arrangement—courtesy of a rib-poking bongo beat and Ailbhe Nic Oireachtaigh’s stabbing strings—reveals the beast stirring within.
Land of No Junction is the sort of record that seems to acquire more confidence and force with each passing track. “Here in the Dark” is a powerful portrait of a relationship at the crossroads, the uncertainty in Frances’ voice manifesting in a seasick, symphonic-rock groove that recalls Air’s Virgin Suicides soundtrack; “Libra” delivers an intimate address amid the strobe-lit delirium of a go-go bar dancefloor circa 1966. But those are mere warm-ups for the emotional bloodletting of “Heartbreak,” which frames real-life drama as ’70s soft-rock fantasia with the same grace and gravitas as Weyes Blood’s Titanic Rising. In this light, the elegiac title track isn’t merely the record’s comedown closer, but the nocturnal sanctuary where Frances can retreat when the waking world becomes too much to bear. “Leave me with this dream, and wake me after dark,” she sings, just as Oireachtaigh’s exquisite string arrangement sweeps her to slumberland. It’s a temporary peace, to be sure, but as Frances demonstrates throughout Land of No Junction, the smallest, simplest pleasures can have lasting effects.
Buy: Rough Trade
