Jessica Pratt - On Your Own Love Again (2015)

Jessica Pratt's gorgeous second record plays like acoustic dream-pop, with a warm, home-recorded atmosphere—finger-picked psychedelia, lucidly layered harmonies, hissy tape effects, an overcast haze—more dramatic and distinctive than her debut.

Jessica Pratt is only 27 years old, but still her music carries the footnote that it was ever-so-close to being lost in time forever. As modern rock tales ought to go, it was one of the San Francisco garage scene's leading local weirdos, Tim Presley, who saved her from relative obscurity. Though Pratt was born in Redding, Calif., her poised, homespun folk songs feel beamed from another time and place, specifically hippie-era Britain; as a teenager, Pratt says, she honed her craft by playing along with T. Rex's Electric Warrior glam riffs and singing early Marianne Faithfull melodies. When Presley stumbled upon a batch of her recordings from 2007, he allegedly dumped his life's savings into releasing them as her 2012 debut. And yet, it took something more for Pratt's spirit to truly be found.

Pratt's gorgeous Drag City debut quietly rejects tradition. For all its folk touchstones, Pratt is more an aesthete than a poet—she sings of bleeding watercolors, blue geraniums—and accordingly On Your Own Love Again plays like acoustic dream-pop. Its warm, home-recorded atmosphere is more dramatic and distinctive than Jessica Pratt: finger-picked psychedelia, lucidly layered harmonies, hissy tape effects, an overcast haze. But Pratt's songwriting is more cohesive and concise, her whispered secrets more alluring. The record's cyclical nature gives On Your Own more momentum, as she sings sticky rock'n'roll hooks learned from Brian Wilson or the Hollies. (Pratt says she listened to Van Dyke Parks' Song Cycle while at work on the album, like her Drag City labelmate Joanna Newsom did when making Ys). Her soprano is hard to pin in a folk context—it variously recalls the high-pitched eccentricities of Kate Bush, the grave depth of Nico—but she ultimately sounds like Vashti Bunyan or Nick Drake as found in the sleepy subconscious of Ariel Pink. "Sometimes I pray for the rain," Pratt repeats near the end of this wintry album, which feels designed to soundtrack the slow-falling snow or any steadied act of nature.

Much of what Pratt communicates is abstract, elliptical, or wordless. Sometimes her crystalline guitar strum sounds like a harp, each note falling quick and elegant like one of said snowflakes; sometimes the songs melt. On the astral "Moon Dude", Pratt makes chord changes evocative as neo-psych time-travel, like Tim Presley's own White Fence project. On Your Own Love Again was made in sunny West Coast terrain, but it captures the somber shades of isolated urban life. Pratt worked on the record in the wake of several difficult endings: a move from San Francisco to L.A., the end of a longterm relationship, and the death of her mother. Occasionally, it sounds like Pratt is plaintively, playfully singing stoned "da-da-da" tunes just to drown out the sorrow or numb the chaos. On "Game That I Play", for one, she imbues, "I often try to leave my thoughts of you behind," but her wish is left hanging; there is no resolve. And on "Jacquelyn in the Background", Pratt similarly drifts, struggling for the right words: "Deep inside my lonely room/ I cry the tears of never knowing you," she sings before a stream of vocalizations. On Your Own Love Again has more earnest moments, but its unadorned emotional uncertainty is profound and relatable.