been thinking bout confession, the third studio album by musician and producer Frances Chang, is a synth-tinged experimental pop excavation of the self and the vast unknown depths it contains. Largely written on a hundred-year-old baby grand piano, the album situates the unbridled emotion of Chang’s DIY roots within a complex and poetic sonic landscape that interweaves orchestral arrangements with idiosyncratic, almost sculptural, electronic and analog interventions.
Throughout been thinking bout confession, the lines between truth and untruth are blurred as the album’s “protagonist” alternately approaches and retreats from a clearer self-understanding. Floaty, alien vocals can turn crystal-clear and piercing in an instant, just as irreverent electronic arrangements can erupt amidst what began as a straightforward piano ballad. Throughout, this sense of experimentation, dislocation and possibility gives the album an exhilarating, inquisitive edge: like the moon reflecting on the ocean at night, the silvery surface of been thinking bout confession belies its darker depths.
Though been thinking bout confession is sonically indebted to the extraterrestrial beauty of Bjork and the retrofuturistic dreaminess of Broadcast, Chang also cites less likely influences like Chet Baker, Dionne Warwick and Burt Bacharach in forming the emotional backbone of the album. For the most part setting aside her usual guitar, Chang wrote these 11 songs on piano, an instrument she refers to as “the feminine root of my psyche.” The album’s uncanny meld of unconventionally deployed spring reverbs, older compressors and tube preamps against a distinctly contemporary digital backdrop forms a listening experience that seems to expand across the past, present and future at once.
