Jessica Pratt’s childish yet chilling voice can haunt your dreams

Jessica Pratt’s wonderful and profound songs develop steadily, in small steps. On On Your Own Love Again (2015), her voice almost drifted into thin air, accompanied by a lonely strumming and often somewhat raggedly recorded guitar. Quiet Signs (2019) had a slightly more generous pop sound, but remained an exercise in minimalist folk. And on her fourth album Here in the Pitch Traces of bossa nova and Californian sixties pop enter her music.

It doesn’t make her songs any less oppressive. Jessica Pratt remains a songwriter who grabs you and doesn’t let go, with beautiful melodies and sophisticated arrangements and especially that mysterious child’s voice, which is endearing but often also chilling.

The echoing drums, tinkling brass bells and slow guitar beat in the song Life Is are immediately reminiscent of the producer work of Phil Spector, and that association suddenly places Pratt’s work in a completely different light. The sun gently breaks through in romantic musings as World on a Stringwhich starts with a single banjo chord but is then allowed to unfold almost orchestrally.

Pratt is clearly looking for other timbres to draw her songs with. In the oppressive Nowhere It Was her voice sounds far away, in a cloud of echo, next to a dreary humming organ. And in Empire Never Know sings Pratt next to a stuffy bar piano and a dazed brass instrument, but how warming her vocal melodies are again.

The closing song The Last Year would have done well in a David Lynch film. But even without images, Pratt’s enigmatic lyrics can haunt you in your dreams. ‘Can’t watch the headlines from my bed. The chapter’s at an end, and I’ll be holding tight.’ An album to completely immerse yourself in.