Jessica Pratt, Bush Hall

Since the likes of Joni Mitchell, Judee Sill and Joan Baez in the 1960s and 1970s, American folk music has never been short of intelligently literary and musically creative female singer-songwriters. Jessica Pratt stands very firmly in this lineage, although she also has some aspects of the enigmatic folk outsider, the Nick Drake or the Bill Fay. In support of her second album On Your Own Love Again, her first on the perennially enchanting Drag City label, she is visiting London to perform at Shepherd's Bush.
Recorded on a 4-track in Pratt’s own house, On Your Own Love Again has a warm domesticity, more quotidian Sibylle Baier than psychedelic Vashti Bunyan, though there is some of the latter’s breezy pace as well. Her voice, though much deeper, has some of the transformative gymnastics of Joanna Newsom. While her self-titled debut was a collection of conventionally structured songs enhanced by obtuse lyrics, here the music has evolved into something less certain, more mysterious. It is difficult to sense exactly where each song will go, but even harder not to want to find out.
Opener ‘Wrong Hand’ sets the tone, with unhurried glimmers of acoustic guitar underpinning Pratt’s gentle-yet-rich, young-yet-old vocals. Tracks like ‘Game That I Play’ have some of early rock music’s strut and bounce while remaining restrained. The gorgeous ‘Back, Baby’, the first song unveiled from the album, takes less than a second to draw you into her quietly mesmerizing world, with guitar plucks so delicate that they sound like a harp. And despite only being two and a half minutes in length, ‘Greycedes’ bursts with musical ideas, Pratt’s strumming summons up tempestuous textures that billow around her voice, with the overall affect being somehow simultaneously aerial and earthy. If her live act has any of her recorded presence, this concert is sure to be a delight.