Itasca: Spring

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Itasca’s Kayla Cohen wrote the anticipated follow-up to her acclaimed 2016 album Open to Chance in a century-old adobe house in rural New Mexico. Featuring contributions from Chris CohenCooper Crain (Bitchin’ Bajas), James Elkington, and members of Gun Outfit and Sun Araw, Spring contains Cohen’s most quietly dazzling and self-assured set of songs to date.

Itasca’s Kayla Cohen wrote the anticipated follow-up to her acclaimed 2016 album Open to Chance in a century-old adobe house in rural New Mexico. Inspired by the landscape and history of the Four Corners region, the sublime Spring—its title summoning both season and scarce local water sources—dowses a devotional path to high desert headwaters. Featuring contributions from Chris CohenCooper Crain (Bitchin’ Bajas), James Elkington, and members of Gun Outfit and Sun ArawSpring contains Cohen’s most quietly dazzling and self-assured set of songs to date. With color inner sleeve, lyrics, and high-res DL code.

 

Highlights

  • Featuring contributions from Chris CohenCooper Crain (Bitchin’ Bajas), James Elkington, and members of Gun Outfit and Sun Araw.
  • Deluxe LP edition features 140g vinylheavy-duty board jacketfull-color insert with lyrics and additional artworkcolor LP labels; and high-res Bandcamp download code.
  • CD edition features gatefold board jacket.
  • Artist page/tour dates/back catalog
  • RIYL Michael Chapman, Bridget St John, Mike Cooper, Steve Gunn, Gun Outfit, Ryley Walker, Aldous Harding, Weyes Blood, Meg Baird, Jessica Pratt, Linda Perhacs, Sibylle Baier, Bert Jansch, Vashti Bunyan, Gram Parsons with Emmylou Harris, Moby Grape, Chris Darrow, The Farm Band, Mary Margaret O’Hara

Physical format music purchases from the PoB webstore and Bandcamp include digital downloads when feasible. Some, but not all, pre-2023 vinyl pressings also include a download coupon. For digital preorders and high-resolution digital downloads, please visit our Bandcamp page.

Tracklist

A1. “Lily” 2:39
A2. “Only a Traveler” 3:46
A3. “Bess’s Dance” 4:04
A4. “Comfort’s Faces” 2:59
A5. “Voice of the Beloved” 4:05
B1. “Blue Spring” 4:43
B2. “Cornsilk” 4:17
B3. “Plains” 4:47
B4. “Golden Fields” 3:56
B5. “A’s Lament” 4:08

Catalog Number/Release Date

PoB-047 / November 1, 2019

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Album Narrative

In the fall of 2017, a year after the release of her acclaimed 2016 album Open to ChanceKayla Cohen, the songwriter and guitarist who records and performs as Itasca, left her home in Los Angeles to live and write for two seasons in a century-old adobe house in rural New Mexico (pictured on the album cover). More urgent escape than fanciful escapade, the move from one Southwestern desert to another resulted from a set of dire circumstances, both personal and societal, not least of which was the sense, shared by many, that a sinister cabal of impaired lunatics had irredeemably poisoned the already sour well of our American discourse. She decided to drop out and dive deeper—hiking into the mountains, through fragrant juniper and piñon forests, past groves of golden cottonwoods, to the source of what she calls in the song “Cornsilk”—with a nod to poet Clayton Eshleman—“the canyoned river.” Inspired by the landscape and history of the Four Corners region, the resulting album, the sublime Spring—its title summoning both season and scarce local water sources—dowses a devotional path to high desert headwaters.

Cohen followed some heavy footprints across the Sandia and Sangre de Cristo ranges. In the long American tradition of lighting out for the territories, many artists, particularly visual artists—including Terry AllenGeorgia O’KeefeAgnes MartinWalter de Maria, Bruce Nauman, and Susan Rothenberg—have famously sought refuge and inspiration in the Land of Enchantment. Captivating landscapes and the astonishing biodiversity aside (outside), foot-thick adobe walls provide a security and shelter—insulation and isolation—that can be hard to find in LA. With her studies of New Mexico’s long history and seismic geological and cultural changes, Cohen sought something different, more ancient—a hearth, a retreat from the noisy and noisome city, yes, but also a deeper historical understanding of urbanity and community, landscape and loss. (Chaco Canyon’s massive architectural complexes ranked as the largest buildings in North America until the late 19th century.)

Her investigations bore bright fruit in the form of an interpretive travelogue: Spring, suffused with mystery and a keenly evoked sense of place, contains Cohen’s most quietly dazzling, coherent, and self-assured set of songs to date. Having withdrawn from and returned to the city, she sounds more like herself than ever before. In the context of the album’s bolder arrangements, her gorgeous, lambent voice and helical fingerstyle guitar plumb new depths of expressivity, confidence, and wonder. Inflected with flourishes recalling the ’70s orchestrated concept albums from which it draws influence, Spring resembles an archeological excavation of Cohen’s own encanyoned style. She recorded unhurriedly, in piecemeal fashion, with various collaborators: first to two-inch tape at Minbal studio in Chicago, with Cooper Crain (Bitchin’ Bajas) engineering; then to quarter-inch tape at home, with a Tascam 388; and finally overdubbing at Tropico in Los Angeles, with Greg HartunianDaniel Swire (drums), Kayla’s bandmate in Gun Outfit, and Marc Riordan (piano) of Sun Araw provided the exquisitely delicate rhythm section; Dave McPeters once again contributed lightning-field flashes of pedal steel; and James Elkington arranged the subtly cinematic strings (played by Jean Cook.) Chris Cohen mixed, imparting some of his signature classic pop dynamics, which press beyond the sonic realm of the solitary singer-songwriter.

If Open to Chance felt moonlit, spectral and spooky, Spring sounds positively auroral, luminous, a brisk early morning walk through lucid daylit dreams, a series of vivid visions in thrall to the dusty New Mexican terrain. By opening themselves to multivalent interpretations, these generous, sun-dappled songs hide nothing. An intentional narrative of discovery connects the sequence, from the beckoning highway apparition in “Lily,” through the immersion in the “Blue Spring” dug deep into the recesses of a cliffside cave, to the resigned farewell of “A’s Lament” (which ends, poignantly, with a blessing to a departed friend: “I just want you to be free”). Elsewhere the links to Cohen’s research are oblique, more atmospheric and impressionistic than explicit. She carefully claims no authority or answers, but instead offers a traveler’s tranquil observation and wide-eyed reflection, weaving together her questions about the relationships between the land and the Ancestral Puebloan culture that shaped it with her questions about her own cultural and ecological bearings. Lead single “Bess’s Dance” provides a metaphorical key to the record’s concept, with a glimpse of the Basketmaker culture’s woven artifacts, functional art objects that so fascinated Cohen that she found herself dreaming their patterns:

Change was rushed by the refrain 
Kept on dreaming of a basket, overflowing with grain 
A worn red cloth woven over the cobs
A single figure of the wild plain

The song ends with a tidy summation of the project, a suggestion of how, through the lens of history and nature, Spring collapses ancient and contemporary contexts to push, languorously and gently, against the constraints of time:

We create great stages where we act out 
the borders of desire

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Acknowledgments

4 stars (Filter review). A desert country waltz of unreality that feels simultaneously haunting and heavenly. Spring is, ultimately, an ambient album, an intimate listening experience of transformation but also uncertainty, attuned to the dead voices and silences of those ancient landscapes and the young woman who now inhabits them. Mercurial and avian, it is a hazy path through a dusty landscape of sadness and enlightenment that never arrives at answers or certainties, but shimmers with an eternal mystery. 

– MOJO

8/10 (lead review). It’s a high form of musical travel memoir, melding the beauty of place with a sense of self. Spring is like a handspun fabric, stunning to behold in full, but astonishingly meticulous when viewed up close, evidence that often the most easygoing work requires a tremendous amount of thought and editing.

– UNCUT lead review 

Kayla Cohen’s got a voice that glows like the sun at dusk, and plays acoustic guitar with a nimble yet intricate touch. 

– NPR

8/10. Cohen’s compositions sprawl in unpredictable directions like a stream of water gushing out of a hillside spring. Initially, trying to grab hold of the logic behind the shifting chord progressions and Cohen’s quietly sang melodies, which seem uncompromisingly dedicated to defying expectations, can be as challenging as trying to hold running water in the palm of your hand. Keep at it, though, and the songs—hinting at highway apparitions, restlessness and longing, and powered by poetic imagery that defies easy answers and effortless interpretation—soon sink their claws in, never to let go again. The Paradise of Bachelor label has considerable past form of locating the most interesting contemporary rebooters of the great North American songwriting tradition. Itasca is a beguiling addition to the list.

– Line of Best Fit

These minimalist songs listen like poetry, and look like stunning landscapes.

– No Depression

Full of crisp mountain air and rivulets of gorgeous folk guitar. It’s the culmination of her many years as an artist, welling her writing into a soft breeze of folk that places her in ranks with Linda Perhacs, Vashti Bunyan, and Jackson C. Frank. The record is full of isolation and loneliness, an absolute treasure of meditative bliss.

– Raven Sings the Blues

A set of impressionistic, sun-dappled travelogues. Cohen’s hushed vocals beautifully meld with her terrific acoustic guitar strumming, piano, discreet strings and the occasional lap steel guitar. Sounding both sparse and rich, tentative and self-assured, it’s a dreamlike set, reminiscent of the warmer parts of Joni Mitchell’s work.

– Morning Star

Cohen’s most salient talent is evocation—trapping place, weather, and physical presence like a butterfly pinned beneath glass. Spring imbues a much-used musical frame—the folk travelogue, an earthy meditation on the state of things—with novel horizons.

– Pitchfork

The music mesmerizes, guitars glide on the streams of dappled western light. Perspectives change with time and tides, yet the moments of beauty that unfold on Spring are eternal.

– Folk Radio

On Spring, Cohen takes tragedy and turns it into a musical journey to investigate her place in the world.

– Bandcamp Daily (Album of the Day)

A beguiling rumination on the expanses she faced during the recording of the album.

– The Fader

Sublime spectral folk from Kayla Cohen, conceived in the canyons and pueblos of New Mexico and subtly gilded by the likes of Cooper Crain and James Elkington.

– Uncut

Gorgeous psychedelic folk.

– Brooklyn Vegan

Cohen’s pure cactus-water voice and sense of cosmic wonderment … leave intriguing tracks to follow.

– Q

It all suggests the balm of a gentle breeze beneath the bright sunlight, a feeling you’d want to capture indefinitely. Cohen does exactly that, suspending an instant in eternal amber. She is able to conjure up something resembling transcendence.

– Pitchfork

The mellow glow [her music] generates is reason enough to want to bask in its evanescent light for as long as life’s harsher aspects can conceivably be held at bay.

– NPR

Simultaneously spare and complex, observational folk ballads turned psychic and strange by metalstringed dissonance and troubling Symbolist metaphor.

– MOJO

Itasca’s old-soul vocals and antique acoustic guitar conjure up classic folkies from years past like Vashti Bunyan.

– Vogue