'Here In The Pitch' (2024) was released on Friday 3rd May and I recommend it to anyone who enjoys Jessica Pratt's music. Here's the third single and its accompanying video.
"Five years without a new Jessica Pratt album is far too long. For half a decade, we’ve been left longing for another dose of her lush instrumentation and lo-fi production, her soft strums and strange vocalisations, for more music made for red wine drinking and red room dancing. Fortunately, 'Here In The Pitch' is well worth the wait, and well worthy of your finest bottle of Malbec."
- Elle Palmer, Far Out
"With her best songs yet, the Californian singer’s fourth album could transform her from fringe act to mainstream success."
- Rachel Aroesti reviews 'Here In The Pitch', The Guardian
'The Last Year'
Sitting down to listen to 'Here In The Pitch' with earphones felt ritualistic to me as a music lover. When the second song came on, with its lilting Tropicalia rhythms, colourful sonic palette and sun-drenched harmonies, I was transported to a place few musicians send me. The first and third songs are the singles 'Life Is' and 'World On A String', which I'd heard many times already, and I mention the second song 'Better Hate' as it has the kind of disorientating chord changes that make Pratt who she is, a psychedelic artist who always displays extraordinary reach on her guitar and bathes songs in melodic suggestion. Haunting chord progressions and shifting vocal moods receive strong backing here from a selection of musical collaborators, as with her previous album 'Quiet Signs' (2019). Clocking in at 27:17, 'Here In The Pitch' is as disarmingly short as it should be, a drifting mood piece that captures a sense of slight unease at the onset of summer.
"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 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."
- Jeremy D. Larson, Pitchfork
"To capture such a transportive mood requires considerable sleight of hand, but Jessica Pratt and her accomplices — multi-instrumentalist Al Carlson and keyboardist Matt McDermott (joined here by bassist Spencer Zahn and percussionist Mauro Refosco) — pull this trick off masterfully with splashes of timpani, baritone saxophone, and glockenspiel so precisely deployed it sounds like there are acres of space between instruments. And while the album title refers to both “pitch darkness” and the sticky blackness of bitumen, there is a subtle arc of light running through the record, what Pratt calls a “weird optimism.” It’s here that she’s found a new path, a space to create something that seems to exist beyond time."
- Daniel Gard'ner, Under The Radar
My song of the year thus far ... 'Better Hate'
I'm biased, but this is my favourite album release of the year so far. My favourite album last year was 'This Is Why' (2023) by Paramore and this may well be the album that touches me most in 2024. My joint favourite musicians / songwriters of all time are Kristin Hersh (Throwing Muses & Fifty Foot Wave) and Tanya Donelly (Throwing Muses, The Breeders & Belly), not least because they never wrote a song in their first fifteen or so prolific years that I didn't love (and still do after years of listening to their respective bands and solo recordings, in fact, I feel even greater attachment to their songs as I get older).
"In 1979, Joan Didion published The White Album, a selection of essays that captured California on the brink of the 1970s, its counterculture dream beginning to curdle. “A demented and seductive vortical tension was building in the community,” as she described it. “The jitters were setting in. I recall a time when the dogs barked every night and the moon was always full.”
There is something of Didion’s description in Jessica Pratt’s fourth album, Here In The Pitch. The singer draws on the seedy history of her Los Angeles home, that peculiarly West Coast sense of an American utopia on the turn, to create her finest set of songs to date. Tales of sins and crimes and “evil innocence” lie beneath a musical palette of bossanova and orchestral ’60s pop. Melancholy moves below lustre. Sweetness buries the gloom. Even the album’s title suggests some latent malevolence. The ‘pitch’ in question refers both to absolute darkness and to bitumen; that oily black substance that forms, oozing and ominous, somewhere beneath the earth, and bubbles to the surface in places like LA’s La Brea Tar Pits."
- Laura Barton, Uncut
"On 'Here in the Pitch,' Jessica Pratt's pop seduces listeners into a Los Angeles noir.
Jessica Pratt's divine precision attunes the present to the past with an alchemy that feels outside time completely. You already know the echo and boom that open the folk mystic's fourth album, 'Here in the Pitch', that bump-de-bump drumbeat on "Life Is" that has traveled from The Ronettes through more than half a century of American music. Pratt's iridescent orchestral pop tune seems to specifically reference the first bars of 1965's "Guess I'm Dumb," a ballad co-written and produced by Brian Wilson when he was under the spell of Phil Spector and on the brink of a nervous breakdown. Wilson would soon step off the road with the Beach Boys, temporarily replaced at concerts by then-session guitarist Glen Campbell, to whom he gave "Guess I'm Dumb" as a token of gratitude.
Maybe it is a coincidence that Pratt's "Life Is" interpolates a beat connected to a genius of California dreaming — Pratt is among those disciples who consider Pet Sounds' studio art "biblical" — and his impending breakdown. But it befits her stated immersion into LA's sinister cultural mythologies on this preternaturally lucid album : the Manson Family lore and helter-skelter violence, the underbelly of Kenneth Anger's Hollywood Babylon. Joan Didion's confirmed paranoias, the jasmine-scented void of her '60s Los Angeles, belong in the mix, too. In its own oblique way, Pratt's music refracts the mythography of LA — "Sunshine or Noir?" as historian Mike Davis framed its duality — in that it dares you to wonder what lies below the perfection of its deceptively simple surface. "I want to be the sunlight of the century," Pratt intones on Here in the Pitch's "World on a String," a sweeping admission with the faintest hint of unease. Who would desire such power?
Mystery manifests on Pratt's albums as the texture of dreams. But 'Here in the Pitch', her best album, often feels waking, transformed by pitch-black night."
- Jenn Pelly, National Public Radio
Throwing Muses - 'Counting Backwards' (written by Kristin Hersh)
'Not Too Soon' - Throwing Muses (written by Tanya Donelly)
Throwing Muses perform 'Garoux Des Larmes', which features a series of psychotropic bird calls redolent of sounds heard in the Cajun-Mexican swamplands of the Atchafalaya Basin ...
Without wishing to sound grand I place Jessica Pratt in the same grouping as my all-time favourite artists and after twelve years of released recordings she's yet to write a song that doesn't get to me. She is my favourite musician of the last twelve years. This opening phase of her career reminds me of Liz Phair's early run that included the Girlysound tapes, mixed singles and her first three epic studio albums which I believe were of some kind of genius ... Kristin Hersh, Tanya Donelly, Liz Phair and Jessica Pratt all "sing (and play) outside the key" within their musical phrasing; arrangement is key but they're comfortable stepping outside of this, if it's right for a composition./
"Jessica Pratt‘s albums are like recurring dreams—hypnagogic visitors that come bearing uncertainty, comfort, and wonder, though maybe not as often as you’d like. On Here in the Pitch, her fourth LP over 12 years (and first in five), the L.A. singer-songwriter expands her sound ever so slightly — moving a bit further away from the sparsely arranged guitar-and-voice folk songs of her earliest work.
Pratt’s music remains gentle and beguiling, carefully crafted with graceful melodies, gauzy vibes, unshakeable patience, and the kind of intimate room-sound that makes you feel like the voice is coming from inside your head. “When you’ve fallen out, get both feet on the ground,” she sings in album opener “Life Is,” a lovely take on laid-back, ‘60s-style Wall of Sound pop. “The curses you keep won’t follow you now.”
Elsewhere, she incorporates new sonic elements without straying too far from her proven formula: A low baritone sax line colors the otherwise light and airy “Better Hate”; “By Hook or By Crook” runs on a drowsy bossa nova beat; “Empires Never Know” is a beautiful ballad built around a piano that sounds like it was recorded underwater; and “Nowhere It Was” makes a lot out of a little, as Pratt sings about mistrust and moving on against slowly pulsing organ tones and a faint raindrop of rhythm.
At the center of these little experiments, of course, is Pratt’s sublime singing voice, wielded like a Swiss Army Knife—sometimes sturdy, sometimes trembling, sometimes adrift, depending on the need. She’s never loud, but then again, the quiet ones often have the most interesting things to say. – "
- Ben Salmon, SPIN
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"Jessica Pratt herself is a historian of all things odd, molecular and terminally West Coast — and her particular fascination for the intersection between the dark undercurrent of her home’s corrosive lore (like the Manson Family) and the cityscape’s neighboring natural beauty (like the San Gabriel Mountains) are injected into the very DNA of Here in the Pitch.
You can listen to these nine songs and think there’s something nostalgic to latch onto — and maybe there is — but what’s so joyous and worthwhile about this collection is how detached from any particular generational label it is. For every nod to the GTOs Jessica Pratt gives us, she also evokes a sonic promise akin to something Dirty Beaches would’ve made 12 or 13 years ago. It’s as indebted to the Crystals as it is to the robust, flamboyant excess of contemporary pop music, building on the ecstatic magic of 2019’s Quiet Signs."
- Matt Mitchell, Paste
'Stratford-On-Guy' - Liz Phair
'Supernova'
Liz Phair on 'Sessions At West 54th' ('Mesmerizing' / 'Johnny Feelgood' / 'Polyester Bride' / '6'1' ¬ 'What Makes You Happy') hosted by David Byrne
... I can only thank Ms. Pratt for all she's been doing and say long may she continue.
