By Torie // The last time Jessica Pratt played in Boston was at Great Scott in 2019. She has actually only played Greater Boston a handful of times—six that I was able to find, including opening for Julia Holter at the now-defunct Church, Jenny Lewis & the Watson Twins at the Wang Theater, and Kurt Vile at House of Blues. Her return in 2024 to champion her exquisite new album, Here in the Pitch, was, as anticipated, a triumph. Along with my spouse N and fellow Test Phase contributor Alice, I had the great privilege of going to the Sinclair to see her return to Boston (well, Greater Boston).
Pratt’s opener, @ (nearly impossible to search for on the internet), was a perfect fit for the tour—so much so that you can literally sneak them into a cute little portmanteau of “Pr@(t)”, if you so wish. The “hyper folk” vibes of the new @ record Mind Palace fit perfectly with Pratt’s own style of music. Alternating between major “Uncle John’s Band”/CSNY/Fleet Foxes influences and grittier notes of Lou Reed and John Cale, this was only @’s third show with Pratt. The arpeggios, harmonies, sparse staging, and timeless underground-like sound (I scribbled in my notebook: “what decade is this music from? Unplaceable, down to clothing) draws you into a surprisingly psychedelic headspace that leaves you with an instant need to buy the record. So we did. Victoria Rose (her name is my name, too) let the crowd know that she met collaborator/bandmate Stone Filipczak in Boston years ago, and the two began collaborating largely by sending recordings back and forth online before they worked together in person. Because of the completed vision of their unique sound it is hard to imagine they weren’t seamlessly blended from the start, and their perfect gel with Pratt’s set makes it surprising to recall that this was only their third show on the tour.
Pratt’s own set was intimate and haunting, par for the course for any other time I’ve seen her. The sensitive support of the band included soft percussion from Riley Fleck of TOPS, Nico Liebman (whose solo project, Harmony Index, immediately demonstrates her fit for Pratt’s accompaniment) on bass/rhythm guitar/backup vocals, her partner Matt McDermot on keyboard, and present-but-unobtrusive saxophonist Al Carlson. The band knew when to hang back, but never sounded restrained; each element was perfectly keyed in to the song it was serving, with Fleck at one point playing nothing but delicate but precise triangle in the background. As Pratt told the Creative Independent, “it’s not overcompensating or stamping out some of the subtleties of the music.” Opening with “World on a String,” Pratt’s charm is instant, and the energy slightly more upbeat than her ghostly melodies can sometimes garner. The first half of the set is naturally heavy with tracks off of Here in the Pitch. “Get Your Head Out” and “Better Hate” in particular have a quality that transport the listener to some previous era, showing the Burt Bacharach influence you can hear in some of her music; with the light bossa nova beats and distant supporting vocals, you feel like you’re in the next room of a fabulous late-summer 1960s cocktail party. The last song of the regular set, “Life Is,” is probably her most Pet Sounds-sounding track on the new record, featuring bubbly cascading vocals that ping pong in your ears over a muted Phil Spector-esque rhythm section. A few of the achingly gorgeous tracks from Quiet Signscreated a bridge across her music in the middle of the set, including “Here My Love,” “This Time Around,” “Poly Blue,” “Opening Night,” and “As the World Turns,” all of which are so inextricably linked to the time in my life when the album came out (in 2019) that it is difficult for me to say anything objective about them—except that they are lovely, and have an almost hard-to-look-at beauty. I wish I could bring you back to the set she played at Great Scott when this album came out, the sound of the hand dryers in the bathroom and all. While she did not choose to include any tracks off of her 2012 self-titled record Jessica Pratt, she did play two tracks off of the 2015 album On Your Own Love Again that introduced me to her back in another lifetime: “Back, Baby,” which was almost startling to hear with a back-up band for the first time, and the titular “On Your Own Love Again,” which she played solo as her encore. Throughout the night the entire crowd was enthralled by the whole set, swaying in unison compelled by the collective unconscious. During “The Last Year,” in particular, it felt like we were all part of a shared romance; I looked down from the Sinclair balcony to see someone in the crowd wrap their arms around themselves and start swaying, a little solo slow dance in the middle of a crowded, vibrating dancefloor.
If you’re only just now hearing about Jessica Pratt thanks to her recent work with A$AP Rocky on “Highjack,” welcome. The new track, which was produced by the broad-reaching Greg Kurstin and also features Jon Batiste, is a reminder of the exciting and enticing quality and possibility of cross-genre collaboration. A$AP Rocky’s own reasoning for picking Pratt as a collaborator points to some of her un-pin-down-able qualities as an artist: he says that she gives a “Portishead meets Stevie Nicks vibe,” a statement with which any Pratt fan would almost certainly instantly agree—and which still only paints part of the picture. Honestly, trying to put her under a strict musical label is a waste of time: she doesn’t really identify with Freak Folk (and once you listen more, you’ll understand why); she doesn’t want to be compared to Joan Baez, much as she respects her. Pratt’s influences are broad and diverse, embracing the orchestral swells in some mid-century artists like Laura Nyro or the eternal Judy Garland; incorporating inspiration that is often easy to hear from the likes of Scott Walker or the Beach Boys; exemplifying the folk-pop influence of the Mamas & the Papas, and the eerie, almost unsettling playfulness of Love; nodding at the old standbys Frank Zappa and Captain Beefheart and Van Dyke Parks; and everywhere in her early work you can hear the adolescent impact on her musical DNA of glam rock like T. Rex (whose album Electric Warriorwas the source material for her first foray into guitar playing), or homemade-sounding punk like The Slits (for example, she recorded her entire second album On Your Own Love Again on a Tascam 424 MK Portastudio 4-Track.) Truly, I digress, and to what end? This only begins to scratch the surface, and all just serves to say that Jessica Pratt can do whatever she wants, and she’ll do it in her own exquisite way.