Review: Jessica Pratt - On Your Own Love Again
By Haden DeRoberts, Contributor
[Drag City; 2015]
Rating: 8.5/10
Key Tracks: “Game That I Play,” “I’ve Got a Feeling,” “Back, Baby”
When White Fence’s Tim Presley stumbled upon a crude four-track bedroom recording of a young Jessica Pratt, he instantanly became enamored with the enigmatic singer-songwriter. So much so that in 2012 he started his own record label (Birth) just to release Pratt’s self-titled debut.
At times, Pratt's debut is so wonderfully unassuming that losing yourself among her soft-spoken lyrics feels like eavesdropping on an introspective monologue, unintended for outside ears. Consequently, Pratt’s debut passed under the radar for many listeners, finding its place on some dusty shelf, waiting quietly to be discovered as a true diamond in the roughest rough.
Jessica Pratt felt sequel-proof--too intimate and complete to move forward from. However, with her sophomore album On Your Own Love Again, Pratt has done exactly that. She creates not only a follow up, but an expansion upon her premiere’s beautifully contemplative work. On Your Own Love Again shows a significant growth in artistry for Pratt, who is able to take what she started three years ago and sharpen it in a way that makes listeners take a step back.
On Your Own Love Again feels archival, with a sound reminiscent of the strange dreamers and folk songstresses synonymous with the late 1960s California music scene, all the while remaining unconfined by the constraints of influence or genre. The result is an album that is both warmly familiar yet unlike anything you've heard before. Pratt has held on to the stripped down, lo-fi bedroom recording methods that have defined her sound thus far, simultaneously restructuring her song style to one less quaint and more raw. On Your Own Love Again is nine tracks, each of which hits hard with emotion.
Highlights on On Your Own Love Again are Pratt’s abilities as both an instrumentalist and vocalist. Pratt simultaneously blends whimsically crooked chord patterns and eloquent, meandering finger plucking with complex, layered self-harmonization; the effect is stunning.
Equally so, Pratt’s abilities as a songwriter are stressed on this record. Lyrically, On Your Own Love Again is deeply poetic. Pratt’s words convey a complex array of emotions and serve to tell stories that are personally contemplative yet highly relatable, adding to the record’s almost eerie sense of estranged familiarity.
Standout tracks “Game That I Play” and “I’ve Got a Feeling” find Pratt’s raspy warble and soft melody rambling along in a form that is as haunting as it is sweet. On these tracks Pratt exemplifies the emotional complexity of her work, as she mixes moments of decadent light with deep darkness. On “Game That I Play” Pratt sings, “People’s faces blend together like a water color you can’t remember in time,” using brilliant imagery to evoke a poignant sense of longing in her listener.
Perhaps the album’s most accessible track, “Back Baby” finds Pratt layering vaguely pop-leaning vocal harmonies overtop breezy guitar progressions. This song is representative of Pratt at her most direct. Stunningly lyrical, the track recalls a love long lost, or perhaps never truly had, as Pratt coos the line, “Your love is just a myth I devised.”
Love is the theme central to On Your Own Love Again--falling both in and out of it, but also drifting around within it. As a whole, On Your Own Love Again seems to blend together in a singular tone, one that without many spikes in tempo or volume can have an entrancing effect on its listener. With its warm radiance, this is the sort of album that invites you come in and stay awhile, but once inside the atmosphere becomes something different all together, like going back to a place that was once so familiar but has since changed.
