Jessica Pratt
Here in the Pitch
MEXICAN SUMMER
ABOVE THE CURRENT
Jessica Pratt has gradually become entranced by the foggy brilliance of the Hollywood noir aesthetic, as heard in her heady blend of folk and jazz music continually curling toward that ephemeral look and sound over the course of four albums. The LA-based songwriter’s self-titled 2012 debut and its 2015 successor fit neatly into the tail end of indie folk inspired by the ’60s and ’70s writers of Laurel Canyon, while 2019’s Quiet Signs was a completely alien soundscape that showcased her unique artistry. The production of her music often feels more important than the words being sung or the instruments being played, and her newly released fourth LP evolves beyond that psychedelic benchmark.
Here in the Pitch is a ghostly full-band full-length which sees Pratt and co-producer Al Carlson layering reeds, synthesizers, and other strange instruments over her well-established acoustic bed of sound. The opener and early single “Life Is” sets the arcane tone early on with its spectral drum pattern ripped out of a lost ’60s cult movie soundtrack. It’s a haunted song that’s somehow uplifting and elegant in its production qualities, and that hand percussion pulls it right along. None of Pratt’s music seems to be autobiographical in the typical sense for current indie-folk artists inspired by the past. She operates more in the quicksilver way established by the post-hippie era songwriters—Nico, Leonard Cohen, Scott Walker—who slipped in and out of musical personas on each track or album.
Pratt continues this Golden Coast façade on the rest of the record. Her music on Here in the Pitch is all smoke and light work like the best noirs of the ’40s and ’50s if they were filmed in the druggy late-’60s. “World on a String” is an airless bossa nova folk song with a keen sense of impending doom (the track’s hippie-commune music video plays up this aesthetic quite well). It’s one of Pratt’s best examples of blending her airy vocals with psychedelically omniscient lyrics: “I want to be the sunlight of the century / I want to be a vestige of our senses free.” Elsewhere, the narrators in “Nowhere It Was” and “Empires Never Know” are not always clearly defined, which makes repeat listens more riveting.
This is the world of Here in the Pitch: Long-haired hippies embracing in nightclubs; Laurel Canyon littered with drug-fueled mania; pretty locales melting from insufferable heat like an old starlet’s photograph fading in the sunlight. Pratt noted being inspired by Stephen King’s The Shining for her songwriting on this record, and the King of Horror’s knack for showcasing broken characters that can peer into the past is certainly felt throughout the record. On the album’s slipperiest moments (“Get Your Head Out,” “By Hook or by Crook”), Pratt ratchets up her experimentation a notch or two with jazz-pop guitar and more feather-touch percussion. She sings on the latter track some of her most cryptic lines on the record: “Some evil innocence, wild century can’t express / A gesture left in summer’s mind / Autumn’s come to find / And it’s the end of the dreams again.”
By the time we get to the beautiful bossa nova piano and guitar closing track “The Last Year,” Pratt has taken us on a real journey. “I think it’s gonna be fine,” Pratt assures in a light purr, “and the storyline goes forever.” Here in the Pitch is the type of musical haunted house where the main characters are starting to discharge their unknown powers and the lucid dreaming truly begins. It’s a fitting metaphor for Pratt’s musical career so far.
