Jessica Pratt
Quiet Signs
Release Date: Feb 8, 2019
Genre(s): Pop/Rock
Record label: Mexican Summer
Music Critic Score
How the Music Critic Score works
Buy Quiet Signs from Amazon
Album Review: Quiet Signs by Jessica Pratt
Excellent, Based on 13 Critics
Based on rating 9/10
Throughout her catalog, singer/songwriter Jessica Pratt's music all but vanishes into its own shadow, the presence of her murmuring vocals and airy nylon-string guitar so faint that songs melt into each other or simply turn to mist. While vaporous, Pratt's songs are anything but slight, as her songwriting is so focused that she can control a mood or shift the color of her compositions from behind a curtain of spare notes and hanging thickets of reverb. On her first two albums, Pratt subtly shifted the light and temperature of her songs as the albums trickled by, both captured through hissy home-recorded means.
Based on rating 8.5/10
It's hypnotic. Gorgeous. And it's soon obvious this is the blueprint the Los Angeles songwriter uses for the rest of Quiet Signs. She's never been one to over-complicate things when it comes to songwriting, here repeating phrases, both musical and lyrical, so that you're caught up in a never-ending swirl of hues, tints and tone.
Based on rating 8.4/10
Jessica Pratt spins fantasy worlds bound to bewitch, dreamscapes that spiral towards the surreal, psychedelic spirituals that nourish. Her music's intimacy feels so organically abstract, it is as if the songs are distilled directly from her subconscious. But as her third record, Quiet Signs, reveals, any perceived effortlessness is an illusion. While Pratt's toolbox remains minimal--her trusty fingerpicked guitar and elastic voice alongside a sprinkling of keys and woodwinds--she weaves these means more intricately than ever, with a firm and confident hand.
Based on rating 8/10
Music that sounds unfinished can summon deeper revelations about yourself. The kind that would otherwise slumber within the subconsciousness: dreams, memories, premonitions, déjà vu. Take Connie Converse's recording of 'I Have Considered The Lillies': beyond the lo-fi sound of her voice and guitar, the track's animated strut masquerades this Macy's Day Parade type of scene with marching bands, horns, costumes, and festivities.
Based on rating 4/5
Jessica Pratt's third record is her first to have been cut in a conventional studio - an environment in which it's difficult to picture her, on the basis of everything that’s gone before. There was a singularity to the sound that she carved out on her self-titled debut in 2012; between her hushed, slightly warbly vocal delivery and her tentative approach to the guitar, it was much easier to imagine the Californian recording to an old tape machine somewhere overlooking a desert plain, rather than in the surrounds of somewhere like Gary's Electric, the in-house studio at Mexican Summer's office in Brooklyn's ever-more-gentrified Greenpoint neighbourhood. Happily, though, the transition is one that only seems to have served Jessica well; 'Quiet Signs' is her most arresting work to date, one on which she's consistently sprinkled the sparse arrangements with nuanced sonic flourishes.
Based on rating 8/10
As a musician, Jessica Pratt is an enigma. She's a thirtysomething, slight folk singer who grew up on '80s cowpunk like X and the Gun Club. She's a wistful lyricist who blends her syllables together in a way that would make Kurt Cobain scratch his head. And on her third album, she's created her most musically ambitious piece of work and it also happens to be her most simple. Beginning with a pair of brief piano tunes, the instrumental "Opening Night" and its vocal-tinged companion "As the World Turns," Pratt subsequently slides into an ….
Based on rating B+
The Lowdown: Softly strummed chords fill the air and a voice that barely rises above a whisper emerges, singing about an ache for something missing. Absence lingers throughout Quiet Signs, the fantastic third album from folk musician Jessica Pratt, both in the spaces between each note of the guitar and piano as well as in her lyrics, subsumed in an emptiness. Without diverging significantly from the approach of her first two albums, which sounded like direct transmissions from an AM radio 40 years in the past, she pushes deeper, discovering a resonance only hinted at in her earlier work.
Based on rating 7.4/10
The worst assumption you can make going into Jessica Pratt's Quiet Signs is that there won't be much there, that minimalism isn't for you. Knowing the folk singer/songwriter's aversion to bells and whistles (and taking into consideration the album's telling title), I myself feared a hollowness, but I was delighted to find the singer/songwriter somehow brings a maximalist energy to a record so subdued you'll refrain from speaking during its quivering 27 minutes, for fear of disturbing the peace. Quiet Signs is a convincing argument for simplicity.
Based on rating 7/10
Freak folk songstress Jessica Pratt leans in on Tropicalia; the '60s hybrid of Brazilian and African rhythms fused with pop. Hallmarks of odd time signatures and unconventional song structures are already idiosyncratic to Pratt's songwriting. "This Time Around" is darker in tone and more introspective. Yet, it shines with a sonic luminosity thanks to pacing and her ability to enunciate and squash vowels with beguiling results.
Opinion: Excellent
Quiet Signs by Jessica Pratt Jessica Pratt has a way of musing over her melodies, humming them softly at the end of lines, trying them out with wordless "ah ah ahs" between the verses. In its pure form, without narrative attached, her voice is entrancingly clear, but full of eddies and turns. When she slips a little vibrato into a long note, it's like blowing on a candle flame; it makes the sound both brighter and more ephemeral.
Opinion: Excellent
It is radical, in a world of constant sensory overload, to use quietness to make yourself heard: something I realise as I attempt to listen to the new Jessica Pratt album over roaring central London roads, office babble, the racket of the Victoria Line. These plinked keys, strummed strings and warbled words are having none of it - Quiet Signs, as sparse and subtle as its name suggests, shares its secrets only with those willing to give their complete and undivided attention in exchange. Though there is much common ground with 2015's gorgeous On Your Own Love Again - prominent and distinctive use of acoustic guitar, at-times unintelligible (yet still beautifully sung) lyrics, a nod to folk music of yore and, of course, that strange, otherworldly voice - Quiet Signs is more finely tuned, sleekened by a studio where previous releases, largely home-recorded, were grainy and warmly primitive.
Opinion: Very Good
When you first hear California singer-songwriter Jessica Pratt's voice it somewhat disarms and disconcerts you. It doesn't really fit into a particular frame of reference, it's slightly eldritch and wavering, but captivating - so you soon become attuned to it. The same could be said for what it's underpinned by. Across these nine songs, there are moments of real loveliness, alongside a few slightly more forgettable ones.
Opinion: Fairly Good
If you're looking for muted mystery, Jessica Pratt's third album, as its title suggests, will enigmatically oblige. Quiet disquiet has been the California singer-songwriter's subtle weapon since her debut, and these nine songs, fully and beautifully recorded in a professional studio for the first time, stick to the winning formula, centred around hypnotically simple acoustic repetitions, muted piano and Pratt's soft siren calls. The ersatz vintage grain of folkish chamber-pop confections such as This Time Around and Fare Thee Well could almost have you believe she's some lost, private-pressed psychedelic prophet, dug up by a label like Light in the Attic or Trunk Records, were it not for the post-millennial tone of her child-witch voice, so reminiscent of CocoRosie or early Joanna Newsom.
'Quiet Signs'
is available now