Itasca – Imitation of War

Paradise Of Bachelors

Kayla Cohen‘s Itasca project has been running now for over ten years and has found a comfortable home of Paradise of Batchelors. This is the third album for them and with Robbie Coady of Wand behind the desk, and with assistance from Evan Backer and Evan Burrows as well as Gun Outfit bandmate Daniel Swire, a more guitar-centric sound has been uncovered and shown to the light.

The two guitar lines shine in very different manners, a simple rhythm allowing flights of fancy free reign, the two intersecting at opportune moments and then diverging to meet further down the road, while Kayla’s voice is a breathy croon straddling the space between dreams and reality. Solos are classical in feel, but if left alone in the desert for too long with the stars and the elements, gradually becoming one.

The guitars are stretching all the time and on the title track, the voice is a soft-focus waft moving through space. I kept thinking that the guitar solos, shimmering in reverb, were a little like a folky Tom Verlaine in that they add to the narrative of the song, often taking over from the voice and elucidating in a different way the various emotions. When the songs are pared down though, the voice becomes more romantic, the ethereal flutter painting gauzy pictures.

Nobody really sounds like this, the pieces covering some sun-beaten patch that mixes folk, jazz and almost medieval intonations into a melancholic sense of yearning. You can’t help but feel the sadness in places as the voice, though light and chiming with vibrato, still carries the weight of experience. Imaginative and wandering guitar pushes at the limits of the song structures and as they peal above you, so you have to dive further down for the lyrics, half-breathed and swathed in reverb, buoyed on a wave of cymbal wash.

It isn’t all languid and when they have a fire in the belly, there is almost a sense of desperation as if hounded by something ,but always with time to check over the shoulder and if possible breathe a sigh of relief. You sense indecision, yet also a desire to take control; and this ambiguity is very much part of the charm. The willingness of all parties to make room for the capricious instrumental passage says a lot about the respect the players have for Kayla’s songs, imbuing them with dream sequence pace and a constant sense of the unexpected.

Towards the end, the haunting ghost of guitar works as a salve to calm the questing voice on “Moliere’s Reprise” and on the last number “Olympia”. As the band plays out, so the voice goes under the microscope, the proximity almost putting Kayla in the room with you, showing you her emotions and helping you to understand this is more than mere music but a work of real subtlety and one that wants you to understand it. Another feather in Kayla’s ever-burgeoning career.

-Mr Olivetti-