by David Wilikofsky
Frances Chang has long been a fixture of the Brooklyn DIY scene, first playing in the art-punk band giant peach and subsequently using a few different names to gig around town and record music. Though support your local nihilist isn’t Chang’s first solo work, it is the first one she has released using her own name. It’s a set of songs that collages pop melodies into something dreamlike and otherworldly.
Listening to its opening notes, you’d be forgiven for thinking support your local nilihist was going to be an album of 90’s alt rock pastiche; the aqueous guitar riffs and muffled vocals of “p much deranged” immediately bring to mind classics of the era from artists like Liz Phair and Lisa Germano. The track quickly subverts your expectations. Chang pulls back with halting, atmospheric passages each time the song starts to build momentum, textures and tempos constantly shifting with improvisational gusto until the song abruptly ends. The rest of the album is just as slippery, each track a collage of half remembered melodies and fragmented thoughts that meander along to their own internal logic. The 90’s references remain throughout, but Chang also touches on everything from contemporary DIY rock to new age, ambient and folk music, mixing together into something far stranger than any of its inspirations.
If there’s one thing you could say, it’s that Chang’s writing is resolutely unpredictable. support your local nihilist is the rare album of songs that feels genuinely avant-garde, favoring pure expression over any kind of convention. It belongs on a short list of recent albums (see Birthing Hips’ Urge To Merge, Shabason, Krgovich & Harris’ Philadelphia and Still House Plants’ Fast Edit), not because the it sounds particularly similar to any of them but because they all contort song structures into exciting new shapes. Chang’s songs are dreams made manifest, surreal and swirlingly psychedelic yet still grounded in real feelings and desires. Follow her down the rabbit hole; it’s a trip well worth taking.