It's been hard to find the words for Jessica Pratt's Here in the Pitch. Even now, I feel more like I'm scrambling against time than saying what I mean to say. Pratt's fourth album does this, pulling thoughts from their hook before they've had time to cure, a constant half-remembering, ideas that drop into the shadows as quickly as they appear.
My best thoughts on Here in the Pitch happen just as I'm falling asleep or just as my eyes open in the morning, the album having played on loop through the night. Of course, as soon as I look too directly at whatever's crossed my mind, it vanishes back into the wet dark.
It's probably for the best — my thoughts on the matter feel pretty unimportant in the face of Pratt's latest opus, a careful expansion of her sound that somehow feels no larger than her precious voice-and-guitar incantations. Anyone expecting some grand reinvention after hearing the drum-forward(!) pop of opener "Life Is" would be mistaken — though the album finds Pratt tilting toward the studio grandeur of Scott Walker or Brian Wilson, her instinctual smallness keeps things desiccated and far-off, echoing through the dark rather than ringing in your ears.
There are some genuinely new worlds that she steps into — the hazy, stalactite-drip dirge of "Nowhere It Was," the stunning piano ballad "Empires Never Know," the gentle instrumental reverie of "Glances" — but Here in the Pitch is a refinement, not a left turn. Laced with horns and synths and drums, it's the most Jessica Pratt album from Jessica Pratt yet, one that makes her previous masterpieces feel like (still necessary, still life-changing) stepping stones.
Pratt ends her quiet night with the sunrise of "The Last Year," a song so perfect and timeless that you'll swear you've heard it before, a million times in a million lives. Pratt dresses the song's classic melody in gentle strums, shy, pattering drums and a tumbling piano outro, a wise and wide-eyed promise of love. It's the kind of song that could play on forever, lighting up the dark and dimming the harsh morning light.