Fantasy Non-Fiction
Written by Jacob Reecher
My relocation to New Orleans in 2015 coincided, oddly, with an old friend's arrival in town. He'd hauled his upright bass down south from Massachusetts to break into the NOLA jazz scene. His plan was ambitious: conquer "New Orleans in my twenties and New York in my thirties."
Things didn't work out that way. He couldn't gel with the musicians he jammed with, old pros who encouraged him to learn a New Orleans style that emphasized danceable rhythms and over-familiar songs. After only a month, he absconded back to New England.
What my friend didn't understand is that New Orleans jazz is different from the cool, cerebral jazz he learned in Amherst classrooms. In New Orleans, jazz is the music of dance halls, block parties, second line parades. It's music for the people-in every sense a popular form. New Orleans jazz musicians play pop.
Sam Albright, Rose Cangelosi, Molly Reeves, and Nahum Zydbel of Fantasy Non-fiction (left to right).
So it makes sense that when Rose Cangelosi, a fixture behind the drum kit in New Orleans' jazz scene, put together the rock band Fantasy Non-Fiction several years ago, she did so with a keen pop sensibility that permeates their self-titled debut. On Fantasy Non-Fiction, the four-piece (filled out by Molly Reeves and Nahum Zydbel on guitar, and Sam Albright on bass, French Quarter pros all) throws down an impressive array of hooks that recall 70s power-pop, 00's indie rock, classic R&B, and the twentieth-century jazz standards they play on a nightly basis in Frenchmen Street clubs.
As befits a drummer, Cangelosi's compositions often feel rooted in rhythm. On opener, "Strange Effect," the drums slink in and out of the verses, stopping and starting like someone hesitant to give in to a feeling. Single "Pressure" lays a disco-beat foundation, and then builds a rave-up over it, piling shimmering synths on top of delayed guitar and funky bass. After each chorus of the ethereal "Don't Want To, I Need To," the band slips from a soulful 6/8 feel into a spookily glacial 4/4 that feels like the cold stare of a recent ex.
Fantasy Non-Fiction also allows Cangelosi to showcase her piano playing, an opportunity not afforded in live settings that keep her behind her drums. "Fired Up" begins as the sparest of ballads, just Cangelosi singing at the piano in a voice clear as a bell. The band's absence accents the fluid melody, constructed not in short chunks of verse and chorus, but in elegant 90-second arcs that reveal the influence the Great American Songbook. After three and a half minutes, however, Fantasy Non-Fiction's other players join in for a raucous two-minute outro, the musical equivalent of the lost temper referenced in the lyrics.
Complementary music and lyrics are a signature characteristic of FNF's songs. What's happening musically almost always reinforces the idea of the lyric. On "Friends Like Strangers," Cangelosi sings, "Or you surrender to the shadows on the wall/even though they got you feeling mighty small," oozing into a surreal swamp of stomping alien echoes that call to mind a bedroom lit through the window by dim yellow streetlights. On the gentle ballad, "Rocket to Mars" she sings of leaving Earth to find love, her voice soaked in spacey reverb. Later, Reeves, Zydbel, and Albright fill the two-minutes-plus outro with a twinkling riff and a blastoff slide guitar. On the chorus of "Strange Effect," Cangelosi's voice wobbles with digital vibrato-"You had a strange effeeeeect"-in a coupling of lyric and production so delightfully on-the-nose you can almost see the wink, feel the nudge.
As a lyricist, Cangelosi's subjects include romantic love and loss, social alienation, friendship, and personal growth. She can turn a phrase (We're too young to be under the pressure/I'm over the pressure), and set up a metaphor ("Hearing your name/lit me up like a candle, I blew out the flame"), but generally eschews figurative for straightforward lyrics that feel like halves of conversations-albeit conversations with complex and ultra-tight rhyme schemes. The verses of "Strange Effect" are representative: "I had hoped you'd agree that it's you, it's not me, as we err on the edge of defeat/Not a whisper or shout, barely open your mouth, as I sit at the edge of my seat."
Cangelosi's emphasis on rhyme again recalls the Great American Songbook, particularly rhyme-heavy standards like "Young at Heart," and "Witchcraft"-songs written when jazz was the most popular genre in America. That doesn't make Fantasy Non-Fiction songs throwbacks; it's only more evidence that this band understands on many levels what makes good music work, and can naturally incorporate these elements into their own sound without sacrificing an ounce of originality. Kind of like New Orleans.
Fantasy Non-Fiction is available now on streaming services, as well as at https://fantasynonfiction.bandcamp.com/ and https://www.fantasynonfiction.com/.