Jessica Pratt
On Your Own Love Again (Drag City)

The intimacy displayed on folksinger Jessica Pratt’s sophomore record, On Your Own Love Again, can be chalked up to a couple of things. First, there’s the California-based artist’s voice, which is an angel-hair hush. Captured on a four-track at apartments in Los Angeles and San Francisco, the album also sounds like it was recorded in secret, so as not to wake the neighbours.

While trance-inducing, the circular, fingerpicked guitar work on “Strange Melody”, for instance, is so soft that you can hear the cry of a car alarm in the distance. The rest of the album plays just as stripped-down, exploring ’70s AM gold and psych sounds on quiet stunners like “Back, Baby”. “Jacquelyn in the Background”, a number on the nature of friendship, gets a little too weird, though, when Pratt slows down and speeds up the tape at random, to mixed effect.

A chance encounter is recalled on the intoxicating “Game That I Play”, with Pratt describing her potential conquest as being more engaging than other faces in the room, suggesting that those faces “blend like a watercolour you can’t remember”. Themes of loneliness pop in and out elsewhere, closing out with the dispirited title track.

On Your Own Love Again doesn’t have to be cranked up for Jessica Pratt to get her point across. The wistful and solitary approach of the album speaks volumes.