Jessica Pratt follows up “Quiet Signs” w/ “Here In The Pitch” on Mexican Summer/City Slang :: 05/03
LA based singer-songwriter Jessica Pratt first came onto the scene after local legend Tim Presley discovered her music via Facebook shortly after it was made public. Her monumental, self-titled debut was soon released on Presley’s then label, Birth Records in 2012 and has since established an incredibly unique career for the musician in the years that would follow. Raised by her mother, Pratt was influenced by Tim Buckley and LA punk bands The Gun Club and X, before she began playing music herself at the age of 15. Within a year the musician would be writing and recording her very own music using her late mother’s old equipment and eventually found herself relocating to San Francisco where she would room with one of the Presley brothers guaranteeing a “rest in history” moment to follow.
Pratt had initially written her self-titled masterpiece back in 2007 over analogue tape with producer Craig Gotsill on deck and with two more releases to follow, “On Your Own Love Again” and “Quiet Signs”, Pratt would eventually go on to sign with heavies like Drag City and Mexican Summer. Further advancing her career with more stable partnerships and cosmic opportunities, she has since gained wide critical acclaim and intrigued audiences worldwide with her soft rainfall voice and deeply gothic ethos of shattered glass imagery and mantra mascara melodies. Exploring the vampiric atmosphere of cold castles quietly tucked away in some long forgotten countryside, Pratt’s abilities as both a musician and songwriter are quite extraordinary as she continues to demonstrate an old world philosophy that many hear, but may not understand as it often explores the deep romanticisms of past, present and future.
I was first made aware of Pratt’s music from a friend shortly after the release of her debut around 2013 and was totally moved by the suddenly familiar vibrations and rhythms that reminded me of Nick Drake, Sibyl Baier and Vashti Bunyan, whom I obsessed over at the time. Her cadence carefully conflicted as it confidently soared over tightly pinched horizons and soft boiled sunsets. Melodies crashing into a merely fleshy cortex of departed light and aloud attitudes of the knee deep in thought, it would be nearly half a decade since her last release “Quiet Signs”, as the musician returns with 2024’s “Here In The Pitch” via Mexican Summer/City Slang once again. A dormant capsule of delayed magnesium releasing a lukewarm river of tranquil mood stability, the album’s first single “Life Is” expresses this honoring ability to slip between the brick and mortar and into a land of geological eternity. Joined by musicians such as Ryley Walker, Matt McDermott, Peter Mudge and Al Carlson, Pratt gracefully adds exciting elements to “Here In The Pitch” that bring this album to a whole new level of sophisticated bliss and agile abundance. With “Quite Signs” being Pratt’s first album made in a more proper studio setting, “Here In The Pitch” isn’t just another polished gem of collected memories and long last fragrances of the mind, but a survey on life and its inquisitive ways of calling on a person to do great things if they so dare. Pratt takes heed like no other and delivers a revelational classic to date.
