Itasca: Open to Chance – "Buddy" (2016, PoB-30)

PoB: www.paradiseofbachelors.com/shop/pob-030
Bandcamp: itasca.bandcamp.com/album/open-to-chance
Other options: lnk.to/PoB30

www.paradiseofbachelors.com/itasca

The music of L.A.-based guitarist, singer, and songwriter Kayla Cohen is mutable and multivalent, richly allusive of the hermetic worlds of private-press canyon-cult mystics and East Coast noiseniks alike. Her adept fingerstyle guitar work—nimble but unshowy, always at the service of framing her plaintively unspooling modal progressions and gorgeous, moonlit voice—centers these melancholy pastorales in a hazy, heat-mirage space equally suggestive of familiarity and distance, community and anomie. Itasca’s enchanting, acid folk-inflected PoB debut is also the first to feature a full band.

This feeling that we, as listeners, have been granted access into Itasca’s private inner sanctum is what helps give [Cohen’s music] its quiet gravity, and her ample instrumental skills and deft songcraft make this invitation well worth your while.
– Pitchfork

The image of the solitary songwriter strumming away and singing promises transparency, but a chief virtue of Itasca is that she doesn’t give up her secrets too easily.
– The Wire

Gorgeous acid folk reverie … a heady slice of lysergic ladies of the canyon, with the feel of tropical microdots.
– David Keenan