album: Likewise - Frances Quinlan
words: Sean Fennell
The first thing you notice are the eyes. A pair of coal-black almond-shaped arches, staring, alert and high-strung, maybe even scared. From there you take in the face as a whole; equally tight, rigid, planted in the center yet far from dominant. Zoom out. Slowly. Let your eye saunter from corner to corner. Green, red and yellow brush strokes fighting for space. There is a scene back there, perhaps a few overlapping one another, as opaque as the face is solid, as confident as it is scared. Then you see it, after everything else, the declaration of support, the angular reminder of solidarity; Likewise. What you’re looking at is a portrait of Frances Quinlan painted by Frances Quinlan, gracing the cover of her debut solo album. Likewise is about more than its creator, containing far more lives than the one in the eyes staring at you so attentively on its cover.
Quinlan is Hop Along, Hop Along is Quinlan. That isn’t necessarily true, but you’d be forgiven if you got that impression. Almost everything ever written about the band has centered on their songwriter and vocalist, but if you’ve been paying close attention, especially if you’ve seen them live, you know Hop Along is far more than just Quinlan. Never one to fade into the background, her first solo record pushes Quinlan to the front, this time by herself, her trademark caterwaul and buoyant lyricism oozing forth without the protection of Hop Along’s more riff-heavy jamming.
Quinlan has always been an acrobatic singer but album opener, “Piltdown Man” shows the more layers you remove, the more she can bend a song’s structure to her will. What starts as a simple keyboard melody amid a field recording of children playing, spins quickly into an oblique tale of late nights, annoyed parents, and wheelbarrow memories. It’s short on specifics, but huge in specificity. Feelings, rather than facts, are of the utmost importance here, an idea served by the stipped-down nature of the song. With less instrumentation, Quinlan’s voice can careen around, stretching and shrinking every word till each line is a diary through a magnifying glass.
Most of Likewise manages to balance its many ideas seamlessly. Years and years of songwriting make this feat seem easy, the effort nowhere to be seen, the seams all but invisible. Take “Your Reply”, the album’s most ready-made hit and the closest thing we have to a Hop Along single on the record. It’s poetic, cryptic, and symbolic with enough obscure references to have you furiously opening one Wikipedia tab after another. In short, it’s everything there is to love about Quinlan’s songwriting, all shot through with a wonderfully catchy chorus and a light, breezy piano melody.
While “Your Reply” may be a lost Hop Along B-side, “Rare Thing” is, well, must I complete this all too obvious pun? But really, it is a fantastic song, its swirling synths, hand-clap drum machine beat, and high-hat puttering give it a wall-of-sound that feels like nothing else on the record. What’s truly unique, though, is what all these flourishes serve to highlight. Likewise is about so many things and so many people. Quinlan’s discussed her tendency to write on the road, which makes sense. So many of her best songs are vignettes, moments captured at their most minuscule, lines of dialogue or chance encounters. “Rare Thing” isn’t that. Sure, it’s tactile and visceral and typically observant, but it’s personal too, far more so than almost anything else in Quinlan’s catalogue. Writing about her niece, Quinlan spins yarns out of small moments of childhood innocence, using them as the antidote to our well-worn cynicism. “I know there is love that doesn't have to do with taking something from somebody,” Quinlan sings, a wonderful foil to a line from “Kids on the Boardwalk” off of Hop Along’s first record, 2012’s Get Disowned. “I want to love without it having to need me,” sings the younger, rawer Quinlan. Loving and needing, taking and giving, these are everyday ideas, vulnerable but reassuringly simple, and just the kind of ideas that Quinlan and Likewise capture so skillfully.