A Love you Cannot Shake

Pascal Stevenson, the Los Angeles-based musician behind Fashion Club, likens the experience of hearing A Love You Cannot Shake to staring into the sun, and though the record wasn’t written with religion in mind, its heavenly sonics and emotional sagacity also make it feel like a prophetic encounter.

The album was shaped by Stevenson’s gender transition and sobriety journey and parses her fluid emotions surrounding these events and other personal trials and tribulations. But as much as it's a dialogue between Stevenson’s current and former selves, it’s also an invitation for listeners to join her in the work of discarding bitterness and recentering hope, especially when such efforts feel futile. 

Though A Love You Cannot Shake is the first album that explicitly addresses her transness, it’s not so much a “coming out” record or a confessional, straightforward tell-all as it is a tastefully abstract distillation of her personal experiences and identities into stirring vignettes that anyone can relate to. Whether it’s the search for self-worth in a society that only values humanity in its relation to capital (“Confusion”), the uncomfortably circular nature of self-growth (“Forget”) or the self-destructive urge to make up for “lost time” (“Ghost”), this LP is rooted in the universal truth that self-actualization is always worth pursuing. 

A Love You Cannot Shake also thrives on a fluid sonic palette. The throttling balladry of “Faith” falls somewhere between gentle pop, glitchy industrial and epic classical music. “Ghost” has a bubbly garage-y techno thrust, and “One Day” soars with its electronic take on anthemic heartland rock. The album’s magnetic immersiveness hinges on its strange dynamic shifts, jagged production and ambitious song structures with parts that don’t repeat—choices influenced by her love of left-field electro-pop and her classical music background.

This album boasts country harmonies from Perfume Genius (“Forget”), high-pitched coos from Jay Som (“Ghost”) and gauzy whispers from Julie Byrne (“Rotten Mind”).