Jessica Pratt - Quiet Signs

The Quietus

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. This refinement is immediately clear, as the slinky, cinematic piano of album opener ‘Opening Night’ leads into the silken melody of ‘As The World Turns’.

Pratt is hard to pin to specific genres, eras, realms, shapeshifting through Quiet Signs’ spindly silver branches like Woolf’s Orlando – at one moment a siren accompanied by synth strings (on ‘This Time Around’), the next a 16th-century courtier (on the Greensleeves-evocative ‘Crossing’), later a mournful chorister (‘Silent Song’) and eventually, on ‘Aeroplane’, an ethereal all-seeing deity.

There is no sense here of a ‘difficult third album’, nor the kind of alarming change of direction that breaks fans’ hearts, but rather a skilful honing of a craft – a less frantically picked guitar here, a more softly spoken word there, a little bit of flute. And what a wondrous thing, for it is, I think, much harder to make what you have subtly better than to try your hand at something completely new.

The album runs for a mere 27 minutes and 51 seconds, so you really should stop whatever it is you’re doing, find a slice of silence – be it midnight on a Sunday or a walk in the woods – and take solace, just for a little while, in the art of quietness.

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Pitchfork 84

The Los Angeles folk musician’s third album is her best yet—a collection of hushed reveries that unspool like daydreams.

Drowned In Sound 80

Jessica Pratt’s work holds a similarly prismatic power. Her new album Quiet Signs promised a more collaborative studio approach, which would suggest a slightly more polished effort. Upon hearing the first pensive notes of ‘Opening Night’, I’m quite relieved this isn’t the case. On the contrary even: the Los Angeles-based musician manages to sound even more sheltered and Delphic than before. And that’s a good thing. The minimal instrumentation surrounding her wispy voice and gossamer strums sounds faint, existing only in the ear’s outer periphery. If anything, these melodic elements feel more textural, a natural ambiance that magically attunes itself to Pratt’s songs.

Quiet Signs by Jessica Pratt

The organ shades on ‘Fare Thee Well’ totter along loosely, as if someone plays them next door from Pratt’s room, deciding to join in ad hoc. The song sounds as if it’s conceived in the same humid, cobblestoned Mediterranean scenery as Leonard Cohen’s ‘So Long, Marianne’. At the same time, its delivery and chord progressions recall the guileless levity of a Carpenters song. Indeed, by expanding the sonic palette and obfuscating the acoustics further, Quiet Signs often sounds like you hear familiar pop staples in their most eroded states. With its sweeping soft-rock flute flourishes, ‘Poly Blue’ sounds like a remnant of Pearls Before Swine’s The Use Of Ashes. ‘This Time Around’ is both sweet and forlorn, swaying like a scrapped take in a Wall Of Sound-recording stripped clean of its maudlin melancholy.

Despite its economy and modest conception, Pratt’s insistence on chiseling away as much as possible from her songs – but maintain their emotional core – actually adds to their mystique. To contrast this approach with recent record by artists like SOPHIE and Low, who made records that stretch pop’s parameters in laborious fashion: there is something to be said about a record like Quiet Signs, which finds its maker willingly dwindle and fade within the corporeal world’s fog and decay. It may be an old fashioned idea, sure, but it’s one that will undoubtedly age well.

The Guardian 60

(Mexican Summer)

After the homespun recordings of her breakthrough, 2015’s On Your Own Love Again, the Los Angeles-based singer has ventured into a commercial recording studio. The tape hiss has gone, yet the fragile, dreamlike quality remains. Piano alternates with guitar as the predominant instrument, and opener Opening Night could almost be a lost Erik Satie reverie, with its quiet keys and gently thoughtful mood. The guitar-strummed Fare Thee Well is one of her loveliest songs to date. Pratt’s ethereal, almost childlike vocals arrive in a cloud of wistfulness and subtle echo and a flute occasionally weaves its way around the tune, the simplicity of her playing and the spaces in the music allowing plenty of room for the listener’s imagination.

Quiet Signs has a slightly jazzier, more soulful feel than her last, folkier outing, with a faint nod to Joni Mitchell on Poly Blue and perhaps even a hint of the Drifters’ On Broadway to the beguiling, sumptuous Here My Love. There’s also a more playful atmosphere to This Time Around and Silent Song. As ever, making out her lyrics is like trying to bottle fog. Clarity arrives in fragments. An “I know it’s over now” here, a “No longer your songbird singing the darkest hour of the night” there. The floaty Aeroplane is as mysterious as it is beautiful, and if some songs risk being that bit too hazy and undefined, Quiet Signs offers another magical otherworld to escape into.

The Guardian 60

(City Slang)

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.