Jessica Pratt – Here In The Pitch: Review

 

 

Jessica Pratt’s new album is a delightful maze of secret passages and echoing rooms.

It’s not easy being enigmatic these days.

If you’re an entertainer, people simply won’t let go: the unwritten new contract states that they have the right to access you 24 hours a day, tearing strips off your mental clothing as mementoes of an obsessive-transactional relationship.

Jessica Pratt’s 2019 album Quiet Signs was a veiled gem. For one thing, it seemed hardly even there; over its criminally short 30-odd-minutes, the Californian’s wispy introspection came across as a ghostly breeze, her veneration of Marianne Faithful, Karen Carpenter and Stevie Nicks as thrilling as it was total.

Lockdown descended not so long after the touring cycle for it concluded, and Jessica Pratt found herself looking for relatability in unlikely places, reading Stephen King’s epic haunted house mindfuck The Shining and obsessing over the morally dubious works of Charles Manson.

As the process of pulling together Here In The Pitch took shape, she moved into an old house in LA’s Elysian Park, a neighbourhood with an old reputation for excess. When the macabre and the fantastic coalesced, a bolder, more distinct identity stalked the results.

Like its predecessor, Here In The Pitch is slight by modern day standards; 9 songs that on the face of it dally with insouciance.

Critics would point out that the penultimate track – a cinematic instrumental titled Glances – clocks in at a fraction over a minute-and-a-half.

Oddly, it serves as something of a musical palette cleanser for closer The Last Year; where as in the past the singer’s lyrics have been shrouded in ambiguity, or even whispered at barely audible levels, here over a bold, jazzy strum it seems things have turned around, a feeling summed up with: ‘I think it’s gonna be fine/I think we’re gonna be together/And the storyline goes forever.’

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This sort of clarity – optimism even – has the effect of disorientation, the impression one of playing witness to a sad couple who are only acting out happiness that’s been grabbed from a mischievously written script.

What comes before is no less intriguing: World On A String features a downshift in key which renders the vocals less familiar sounding, but the dreamy, amorphous soundscape they live in is set off by eerie mellotron and drums not so much brushed as caressed.

In interview, Jessica Pratt has floated the idea that played back-to-back the difference between this new release and her former are less than stark, but whilst that’s superficially apparent, Better Hate’s reedy sax and gyrating Bossa exude a confidence not evident on other works across her career.

Opener Life Is rolls effortlessly wearing the lustre of monochrome 60’s girl pop and touching its essence through filmy silver veil, but what light there is however rapidly dwindles.

The record’s heart lies in a sequence that begins with Get Your Head Out (of what is never made clear), which as it ebbs uses a discordant vintage synth patch that underlines the track’s resemblance to the Anglophile weirdness of Broadcast or Stereolab.

In continuance, the slow burning, organ-led Nowhere It Was has an air or paranoia, the question asked, ‘Who is there to trust?’, whilst Empires Never Know – which at first drops down in substance to a solitary piano – eventually resolves into a harmony which self-evidently is trying to outrun whatever’s in the rear view mirror.

It’s not easy being enigmatic these days, and Jessica Pratt would probably demand you look up the definition and explain where she fitted to it.

But, Here In The Pitch is an album which ends up forming one giant question, a delightful maze of secret passages and echoing rooms.

Unanswered questions and half torn maps have rarely sounded this good.