THE UNCUT GUIDE TO THIS MONTH’S KEY RELEASES
KASSI VALAZZA
From Newman Street
Cross-country travels with a young folk artist searching for stable ground. By Stephen Deusner
“I’m stressed out, I’m far away/There’s a dizzy dancing in my head”
LOOSE/FLUFF & GRAVY
KASSI VALAZZA opens “Roll On”, a meditative country-tinged ballad from her third album, with a stark realisation: “I’ve made up my mind, I feel like I do”, she asserts over a slow-motion two-step rhythm and thick brushstrokes of pedal steel and fiddle. “And if I feel like I do, I’ll try moving on”. Her voice is a high, sharp lilt that brings to mind Joan Baez or Carolyn Hester or other folk singers from the ’60s and ’70s, with a gentle vibrato and a gift for windswept phrasing. She sings like the breeze is scattering her syllables like leaves. “Roll On” is a break-up song – with a lover perhaps, but more likely with a city – but she instills the song not with resentment or sadness, but a precarious excitement for a new beginning.
From Newman Street is an album full of chapters closing and new ones opening, created by a singer-songwriter who embellishes her folky observations with psychedelic flourishes and knowing nods to the past. It is also, she says, a tale of two cities. Valazza wrote a little more than half of these new songs in a small basement apartment in Portland, Oregon, working in seclusion before joining her trusted touring band to record at a local studio.