Jessica Pratt’s ‘Here In The Pitch’ is out today! Listen to our pick for album of the year…

The Los Angeles musician Jessica Pratt spent three years composing her new album Here in the Pitch, a title that she says references the La Brea Tar Pit’s primordial ooze and creeping LA darkness. Pratt’s Northeast LA home, a rustic 1930s hunting cabin, is located along a cul de sac where coyotes and bobcats occasionally amble into the neighborhood from nearby Elysian Park. In the early 20th century, the cabins were inhabited by a coterie of radical writers and musicians. In the ’70s, two bodies linked to the “Hillside Strangler” murders were found at the bottom of the street. 

These layers of history entered her muse during periods of forced and unforced isolation between 2020-2023. Pratt, who has released three other albums since 2014, set her gaze on the flip side of the California dream, the contrasts and contradictions of a place she calls “the epicenter of most of my favorite music.”

Those in Los Angeles can hear Here in the Pitch early, when we host a listening party on May 2 at our experimental pop-up with dublab, Sound & Vision, at ROW DTLA. The record deserves to be first heard on a killer sound system, after all. Jessica herself will be in-store signing LPs, and we’ll be giving away a special test pressing to the first person who buys a copy of the album in-store.

The album is available now: https://insheepsclothinghifi.com/product/jessica-pratt-here-in-the-pitch-lp/

The artist, who grew up in Northern California, explored lyrical portals involving what she described in release notes as “the duality of light and dark, early Hollywood, occult figures and happenings, political upheaval, grisly crimes and corruption, the natural world, the deserts and mountains, the old oak trees and reptiles, the dead yellow grass and the freeways, the quality of the sunlight, the Pacific Ocean.”

Here in the Pitch, which comes out Friday, is Pratt’s first album since the acclaimed Quiet Signs in 2019. Like that one, it was co-produced with Al Carlson, who adds baritone sax, organ and the album’s corridors of tape echo, reverbs and delays. Pratt’s partner, the writer-musician Matthew McDermott, contributes various Mellotron touches and additional production throughout, often with the help of Peter Mudge, who has produced tracks for Mac Miller and Kendrick Lamar. The famed Brazilian percussionist Mauro Refosco (David Byrne, Atoms For Peace) adds fascinating and unexpected rhythms throughout the album, with bassist Spencer Zahn, drummer Alex Goldberg and guitarist Ryley Walker appearing on various tracks.

Touchstones? Fred Foster’s work with Roy Orbison. Owen Bradley’s collaborations with Patsy Cline. Chet Baker’s essence. Brian Wilson’s production masterpieces at Gold Star and Western Recorders in Hollywood. Songs such as “World on a String” and “Empires Never Know” exude a certain Lynchian menace. Pratt, whose inspirations are as dynamic as her vocal range — she schooled herself in music history by working in record stores — cites artists including Wendy & Bonnie, Karin Krog and Scott Walker.

As if recorded in a velveteen chamber filled with candelabras, throughout the album Pratt’s voice seems to arrive not from a body but a being. Often instrumental little accents float in, glisten for a few choice measures and fade away. When she declares, in “World on a String,” “I want to be the sunlight of the century/I want to be a vestige of our senses free,” she does so in a way that in earlier eras might have flustered bishops and mesmerized mystics.  

By focusing on these ideas and topics, Pratt says “it was easy to get sucked in, because these tendrils creep into so many different facets of the LA history I find interesting.” 

Noting that she knows she’s closing in on a song’s essence when it “starts to feel like a personality is present in the vocal part, like an innate quality or aura of something or someone,” Pratt was more selective this time when bringing songs into the studio. This evolution is the result of what she calls “better intuitive footing” and being “more sure of my ability to perform and translate the material in the studio.”

“The Last Year” requires only a snare and, eventually, a melancholy piano run to give it structure. She dances across a melodic line on “Nowhere It Was” supported by what sounds like two stones knocking together. The weird organ line that appears in “By Hook or Crook” comes and goes like a freight train rolling through a rural crossing. Notes ease across the measures, with Pratt’s phrasing subtly bending time and rhythm to massage the lyric’s emotion. 

She adds a sandpapery rasp to “Get Your Head Out,” an immersive, noirish tune pairing bossa rhythms with a haunted organ line. On “Better Hate,” Pratt pinches and hones her vocal cords as if sharpening the tip of an arrow. Throughout the album, she pauses to linger on words and phrases – “friends with the enemies,” “who is there to trust?,” “inside these walls again,” “twilight thieves in the rain.” 

Here in the Pitch truly glows at full volume, preferably when and where you can give it your full attention. This is not background music, though it will certainly improve the environment when used as such. Rather, it deserves the kind of attention afforded a film or opera: The more intently you listen, absorb and internalize, the deeper you travel into the pitch.

Details
What: Jessica Pratt listening party and record signing
Where: Sound & Vision at ROW DTLA, 777 S. Alameda St.
When: May 2, 3-5 pm.