Los Angeles-based singer-songwriter Jessica Pratt’s gentle, homespun songs sound so natural and effortless that it almost seems as if she’s composing them spontaneously. However, her 2012 debut album sat on the shelf for years and this outstanding follow-up has been the product of two years of home recordings in LA and San Francisco. Perhaps working quietly away from bustle has helped the 27-year old craft folksy songs that – tape hiss and all – are magically out of time. They sit neatly alongside Sandy Denny, Nick Drake, Nico’s Chelsea Girl and Angel Olsen: ethereally beautiful with a dark undercurrent. “Dreams I had before play in my mind,” she sings on Wrong Hand – but no one sounds quite like this. It may or may not be significant that the songs were recorded in the aftermath of her mother’s death, but she delivers words about breakups and loneliness with a strangely comforted serenity: the dreamlike radiance of a calm after a storm.
