Tape hiss is a prominent feature on Jessica Pratt’s On Your Own Love Again. It’s a signal that you’re going to be drawn in and held at close quarters so that Pratt can seduce you with her enigmatic, helium-sucking vocal and harp-like guitar plucking. You have little choice but to be completely engaged over the half hour of storytelling that follows.
Anyone contemporary with an acoustic guitar and considered ‘quirky’ is immediately categorised as ‘freak folk’, but Pratt’s style is more in line with classic folksters like Marianne Faithful and Nick Drake. On Your Own Love Again has a timeless folk feel, but it’s still fresh and vital. Pratt sticks to a stripped-back, skeletal framework but scatters the songs with sonic surprises. The final minute chord change of Game That I Play subtly changes the tone and also makes it act like a segue to the following song, Strange Melody. The dragged-out pitch shift that slows Pratt’s vocal in the poignant Jacqueline In the Background cleverly snaps the listener out of the clarity of the present experience and throws you into a shadowy memory. Then there’s the forward-looking clarity of Back, Baby; this penultimate track has an unexpectedly buoyant lift to it that sums up the collection’s assuredness and clarity.
There are some sad subjects dealt with here but it’s never a downer. Pratt’s bewildered by the ‘moon dudes’ of her past, though she never lets the baggage of the past weight her down, and delivers an evocative work that makes good on the promise of her 2013 debut.
BY CHRIS GIRDLER
