Jessica Pratt - Here In The Pitch

Jessica Pratt songs don’t present so much as written but found. On Here In The Pitch, just her fourth album in over a decade and first for City Slang, Pratt manages to maintain that trademark trick-of-the-light conveyance while also adding a little meat to the compositional bones. If these are unmistakably Pratt-divined songs, the arrangements are now a touch more lush, the production that bit more filled out, the influences wider ranging (Pet Sounds and Scott Walker are listed as inspirations, alongside the usual Laurel Canyon reference points). Crucially, they never sound overworked. There's no great evolution, more a doubling down on that in which there is already great faith - Pratt knows her voice very well and when that's the case the songs tend to drape around it. Adorned or otherwise, Pratt is Pratt. I want to avoid terms like 'classic' and 'timeless', not least because they're so deeply embedded in the tired empiricism of hegemonic Rock History, but the lilting melodicism and worldie-wise effortlessness to the way that Pratt communicates do bring to mind such thoughts of The Great American Songbook. How have we not heard these songs before? Perhaps they were always there? Did we just need someone like Jessica Pratt to bring them towards the light? It is, as they say, the singer not the song after all. And few singers of songs out there seem to hit on such beautiful truths. No wonder there's such protracted gaps between Pratt albums -  the diamonds you find hidden out there don't form over night.