Itasca
Buck Meek
★★★★
Imitation Of War
PARADISE OF BACHELORS. CD/DL/LP
The Gun Outfit collaborator softly stuns with her best album yet.
“My prayer is tired,” sings Itasca leader Kayla Cohen late into Tears On Sky Mountain, her honeyed tone rising like first light, “but my rosary is long.” Indeed, Imitation Of War, the first Itasca LP in five years, gently overflows with all manners of worry: hope that lingers like a head cold, grief that demands your whole mind, conflict that leaves you quarrelling with yourself. But Cohen and her modest band light small fires beneath these poetic dispatches – suffused with pinpoint images of prairie, sky, and mountain and multivalent invocations of mythology – and let them burn away, the rising ash doubling as falling snow. Cohen’s voice moves like a vintage guitar with a responsive whammy bar, conveying emotional nuance through every shift. And speaking of guitars, this should be Cohen’s coming-out party as one of the form’s most stunning instrumentalists, a child of Garcia, Verlaine, and electric Mitchell who absolutely stuns on Easy Spirit. A gently breath-taking wonder.