Jessica Pratt on Your Own Love Again Full Album
Jessica Pratt'due south new album, On Your Own Love Again, comes out Jan. 27. Colby Droscher/Courtesy of the artist hide caption
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Colby Droscher/Courtesy of the artist
Jessica Pratt's new album, On Your Own Love Once more, comes out January. 27.
Colby Droscher/Courtesy of the artist
On Your Own Love Again
Audio for Outset Listens is no longer available after the anthology is released.
"Night Faces," the opening track from Jessica Pratt's extraordinary 2012 debut, showcased a singular power to transform a worn-out cliche into something stirring. Only through the choices she made as a vocaliser.
Pratt's verses wallow, at times, in tortured confessional rhymes — i from "Night Faces" has her shedding "a million tears trying to dig myself out all these years." Withal somehow, in spite of the faux-exotic accent and the quirky clustered phrases that avoid the common cadences of folk and rock, Pratt'south words evoke and describe states of being that are more nuanced than their literal meaning. They seem to call from remote states, inviting listeners to visit this identify that sounds familiar just isn't. With little more a weary sigh, Pratt flips the banal into the magical; she makes listeners wonder most the circumstances she describes. At that place'due south more. Yous can experience it in the pauses, the implications, the breath.
Pratt'southward first album was intoxicating from start to end — hushed, at-home, fragile narratives shot through with glimmers of carefree California lite. Information technology was different from other music that shared the "freak folk" tag, and also so fully realized as to seem sequel-proof: She'd recorded mostly at home, in quiet moments, and left some tunes lone for years before sharing them. Information technology felt consummate.
Or maybe not. The beginning thing to know about On Your Own Love Again is that it, too, is homemade — though Pratt does expand the temper with hints of electric guitar, and keyboards, and gorgeously thick unruly rainbows of vocal harmony, her secret weapon. Pratt seems to empathize that her fine art thrives best in sparsely furnished rooms; she'due south the kind of artist who might get lost with a big budget and lots of toys in the studio. Too much industry could shatter the crystalline core of her songs in eight measures or less.
Preserving and extending the contemplative vibe of her debut, Pratt creates a series of dream-like miniatures that feel intimate and mystical-fantastical at the same time. Some repeat the neat fob of "Night Faces" by transforming the familiar into the deceptively sublime: In an astounding, drone-based song called "Strange Melody," Pratt quotes the doo-doo-doo-doo refrain of Duran Duran's "Hungry Like The Wolf" in a sultry, musing style that fits perfectly into her scheme while magnifying its genius.
As well, the animated "Game That I Play" is anchored by a tightly scripted acoustic-guitar blueprint that's rooted in California folk-rock of the '70s. The refrain continues the reference, with a bold Mamas And The Papas-style wordless vocal hook. But the rest of Pratt'southward vocals, especially in whispery lines that trail off into space, blur that time-stamp: All of a sudden we're miles from civilization in the melancholy mists, and it's non entirely clear how we got there.
On Your Own Dearest Again is total of these swerves. Pratt writes in short, windswept episodes — hook after claw, Taylor Swift-way, except they seem to refract common pop devices and send them into weird, otherworldly places. Just when there's a solid declaration to grab onto — like the line in "Game" that observes how "people'southward faces blend together similar a watercolor you can't recollect" — it'southward followed by something fleeting and indistinct, a shadowy hum or an unexpectedly ingratiating wisp of nearly inaudible private melody.
These little asides are vital to Pratt's understated, often ambiguous songs, which glance at the conflicted emotions of Sandy Denny'southward solo work as well equally the stark, lingering introspection of Nick Drake. With Pratt, y'all pay attention to just the words, and then the breaths that follow, the echoes, the contemplative vapor trails receding into the distance. At that place are epic stories swirling around inside of that stuff, and they might not necessarily be the same stories she'south telling in words.
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Source: https://www.npr.org/2015/01/18/377191234/first-listen-jessica-pratt-on-your-own-love-again
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