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(2024) Jessica Pratt - Here In The Pitch [FLAC]
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There is already so much to admire about Jessica Pratt the folk artist: her elliptical lyrics, her nylon-string guitar and voice to match. But the label of folk singer-songwriter doesn’t quite capture the real essence of the Jessica Pratt song. It is difficult to describe, like a dream that doesn’t go anywhere but still feels like you should talk about it in therapy. In the bottom right-hand corner of the lyric sheet that accompanies the physical release of her fourth album, Here in the Pitch, Pratt includes a quote from Leonard Cohen, pulled from a 1975 Crawdaddy interview about the genesis of songwriting and trusting your own process: “The fact is that you feel like singing, and this is the song that you know.” The great joy of Here in the Pitch is getting familiar with this mysterious song that Pratt knows so well. There are nine of them here that amount to less than half an hour of music—notable not only in an era of gluttonous releases but also because it’s the same track count and 27-minute runtime as her last record, Quiet Signs, which she put out five years ago. Now, for the first time on her albums, there’s some light drumming and synth playing, a few basslines and distant bongos. Yet none of this makes the music sound bigger. It’s as if we’re zooming out while dollying in, a hypnotic shift in perspective that makes the music sound more intimate in a larger space. It is a prime example of hypnagogic folk that quietly explores the simultaneity of time in all its misery, wonder, and promise.
Which is to say, it also has a lot of reverb. What did she use as a reverb chamber, an Olympic natatorium? No, but as on Quiet Signs, Pratt continues to put the studio to work for her the way famed pop innovators like Brian Wilson or Phil Spector did by letting her voice sound like it could fill a cathedral in these tiny little songs. If her first couple of homespun records were her Pink Moon, this one has more the feel of Bryter Later, the warm sound of psych-folk melancholy sparsely appointed and loosely fleshed out. Sprinkle in the Brazilian rhythms of ’70s MPB albums and the pinpoint vocal precision of someone like Judee Sill or even a jazz singer like Anita O’Day, and you’re starting to map the old soul and hazy recombinant soundworld of Here in the Pitch. Something in its chemistry will turn any speaker into a vent that leaks the album into the room until it is invisible and all-consuming.
To understand this mysterious Pratt song, one must submit to its dream logic. She’s one of the few songwriters who favors the verse over the chorus. There’s no release of tension or fulfillment of a promise when she arrives at something resembling a chorus. Instead, her choruses gently turn you around and lead you back to the verse, where Pratt’s vocal melodies gambol and cartwheel around the space. The timbre of her voice resembles a breathy saxophone, like a cool Paul Desmond bossa nova tune. It is reedy and precise, languid and surprisingly technical. No one could just sing the melody on the verse of “Get Your Head Out,” right? You can hear just how considered every note is, each sung with her own unique interpretation of American vowels.
…There’s a more subtle use of post-production effects on the dizzyingly obtuse highlight “Empires Never Know,” a rare piano-led song that features some backmasking effect on the vocals. You only hear it for a few seconds, but it’s crucial. Like Cindy Lee’s recent hypnogogic Motown pop record, Diamond Jubilee, the way Here in the Pitch uses the studio to bend and abstract the instruments makes it sound more like a transmission than a recording. These albums feel beamed in from far away, or long ago, so that this imagined distance the music travels makes each song feel much larger and more important than if it were produced like a Tiny Desk concert.
“Empires Never Know” also becomes the closest thing to a title track when Pratt sings, “I never was what they called me in the dark”—if you take the “pitch” in the title to mean darkness and not black tar. The syntax of that line is typical of the Pratt song. She uses odd tenses and conditional grammar to comment on the past or presage the future. These lines emerge as riddles and half-thoughts: “I used to want for what your desolation hadn’t come by” or “I soon should know what remains” or “It’s only lasted for awhile.” Pratt’s narrator is constantly inquiring about emotional states, searching high and low for the right phrase to evoke a feeling that’s difficult to name. This temporal displacement and imagistic writing make Here in the Pitch feel vaporous at first, but it soon becomes its own transfixing language, a magnet that makes your internal compass go haywire.
“And wouldn’t you say the past’s no longer quite as near as you’d like?” Take a minute with that one, from the final, warmest, most hopeful track, “The Last Year.” You’re witnessing music’s greatest horologist create another ornate clock to hang on the wall. Time is her muse, after all, this invisible force that binds the whole of the world to the same path. Her four albums comprise a body of work that is a metaphysical exploration of time and what you can find in its pockets. Her song considers how strange it is to conceive a distance between two moments, and likewise, how beautiful it is to consider the distance between two people. This is the Jessica Pratt song, and Here in the Pitch hones it to its finest point. — by Jeremy D. Larson on Pitchfork
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