I pre-ordered Jessica Pratt’s Here in the Pitch the moment I learned I could.
Out today on Mexican Summer, Here in the Pitch follows 2019’s Quiet Signs and it was well worth the wait.
From the liner notes:
On her fourth album, west coast artist Jessica Pratt expands the scope of her artistry, placing her sharpest songs to date within an ever-broadening pool of influences including spectral ’60s pop, Hollywood psychedelia and bossa nova. Whereas Pratt’s 2019 record, Quiet Signs, floated elegantly in the ether, Here in the Pitch is entrenched in more earthen characteristics, as the title suggests, and her craft is emboldened with a newfound gravitas.
Spectral 60s pop is how I first attached to Pratt’s music with hints of Petula Clark and her signature song “Downtown” which I first soaked in from the back seat of my mother’s car when I was too small to see out the windows on the way to the Paterson markets and can still recall the impact it had on my young 1960’s self as it made me painfully aware, for the first time, of something already inside—an emptiness, a distance—already fully formed.
But Jessica Pratt paints her own lonely landscapes tinted here with more than hints of bossa nova, cries & whispers. Here in the Pitch takes things further away from the familiar, even more apart from the norm yet tethered to it with tenuous strings of attachment pulled tight ready to snap.
From an interview in the NY Times:
“If you want to get metaphysical about it, it’s layers of human experience that may still be reverberating,” she said, thinking about the prehistoric ooze that burbles under Wilshire Boulevard. “That is absolutely the lens through which I see my reality every day, as swimming through these unseen layers of history and energy.”
Wrapped in cheek-to-cheek warm seductive melancholy, Here in the Pitch is subtly stunning, a polished gem, a treasure.