Review: Frances Luke Accord rise as majestic phoenixes on new EP, ‘Silver & Gold’

Prolific author and activist Helen Keller once shattered the perceptions of life’s fragile beauty in her 1903 autobiography, The Story of My Life. “If the light were not in your eyes, dear Mr. Brooks, you would understand better how happy your little Helen was when her teacher [Anne Sullivan] explained to her that the best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen nor even touched, but just felt in the heart,” she wrote to Reverend Phillips Brooks in the inserted letter, which she originally wrote when she was just 11 years old. Those words echo across 100 years of technological and sociopolitical developments and have not lost a single ounce of luster. Folk duo France Luke Accord seem to have dipped their new EP, Silver & Gold, in such breathtaking shrewdness to depict the thorny and sometimes poisonous journey of life.

“What is this coming to? / What kind of failure lets this one through? / Oh, how did it get so bad? / In what seems like so little time in the end,” Brian Powers weeps budding lilac petals, gently floating as snowflakes through the ether. Band mate Nicholas Gunty hums and comes up to meet him at the center, a swirling pool of broken branches and twigs that operate as fragments of past experiences and notions. Each feeling a tremendous, heart-rending upheaval in their chest, ripped open and shredded and cast in the sweet ripples of acoustic guitar, “Silver & Gold” is both the backbone and the bookend of the record. They seek fearless for heavenly redemption, even if they know it’ll never come. “I get so twisted up / Bent out of shape / Stuck in a rut,” the pair twirl and bend in silvering moonlight, crying out for a moment of solace away from the world’s furious state. “I wish I could let it go / Wish like my life is beyond by control….”

That sting pricks, swells and reddens their skin. “All my short life I’ve always run / Lost and won in right and wrong / In the long run, life goes on,” they tug the edges of their heart into floating ribbons. The dazzling strips fall and fade away with “Honeyguide,” a collaboration with Humbird, and their existentialism, one very much rooted in pain, spurs them onward into a dark and dangerously-slippery world. A thick smoke sticks to their cheek bones, their eyes descending into a silky mist, but that’s to be expected. “Little Lie” trips and gallops along with prominent violin wailing and crackling as the guiding beacon in the abyss. “Run little lie / Run like a child / Run like we’re running out of time / And until the dark of your grave, be a light in my cave,” Powers and Gunty pull the coldness of the earth closer to their bones to somehow unlock further clarity.

“Call Me Mine” then is the return trip, the ascension into the clouds as images of majesty spill from their lips and off their tongues. “Build me up and put me down / Brim it with jewels and shatter my crown,” they mark their steps with vigorous melancholy. The gloom, even in the afterlife, hangs ceremoniously overhead, and their only escape remains the music itself. “Any stick I would throw on the fire / If it makes me the man you’d admire / And when the time comes that one’s gotta go / Maybe now won’t feel so on our own / Until I come back around like a ring,” they sing. The words escape in flutters, as if they’ve emerged from a long winter’s nap to reclaim what has since been stolen away.

Silver & Gold is a masterfully radiant body of work. Simply, Powers and Gunty have achieved a particular level of majesty across all four songs, as meager as they are. The record, their first since 2016’s debut LP, Fluke, also weaves the literal distance between its storytellers ⏤ they worked out of their Chicago and Philadelphia homes, respectively ⏤ to tighten and heighten the gravity of each chapter. In shrouding behind elaborately joyful arrangements, often feeling utterly blissful, they are able to twist the knife of the brutality and sorrow that we, as human beings, frequently bury and ignore and just hope goes away.

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