From the start, Jessica Pratt was a blast from the past. The 37-year-old Californian’s first three albums – lo-fi collections of acoustic folk dirges with prim, mannered vocals in the mid-century style – could have been feasibly recovered by a crate-digger; one who might have felt suitably spooked by her ghostly, sometimes eerily childlike delivery. The idea that these songs had been languishing in obscurity would have been entirely plausible too: for all their atmosphere, Pratt’s foggy songwriting lacked the kind of melodic and lyrical hooks necessary to get anywhere near the mainstream cultural conversation.
Herein the Pitch remedies this; her fourth album feels like an unjustly forgotten classic. She retains the retro feel – this time, Pratt meticulously recreates the airless ambience of a 60s music studio (the Mellotron helps). And, adding rumbling percussion to offset her super-sweet vocals, the musician pulls her typically enigmatic confections into sharp focus with beautiful, brightly melancholic melodic phrases, creating choruses that are subtle and sophisticated but still memorable enough to feel gratifyingly familiar the next time they come round.
Clearly, Pratt was never going to produce a banger: these are still all mood pieces, operating within a small tonal continuum of wistful sadness. But most songs here – especially the magisterial opener Life Is, and the tear-jerkingly triumphant World on a String – possess enough of a pop mindset to transform Pratt from an eccentric, slightly self-indulgent fringe concern to an artist primed to win over anyone.
