Jessica Pratt’s timeless songs at Rev Hall
LA singer-songwriter Jessica Pratt plays Revolution Hall this week.
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Background noise seems to drop out whenever a Jessica Pratt song is playing. The LA singer-songwriter, who’s playing Revolution Hall Sunday (August 3; $35), is preternaturally captivating in a way that’s usually reserved for dreamy indie musicians in B Netflix movies. A few seconds into a song, you realize there’s no air in the room, so you shut up. Something haunting and timeless is taking place.
Reviewing Pratt’s latest record, 2024’s Here in the Pitch, for NPR, the critic Jenn Pelly cast her as an acid-folk Nico, and traced influences of Phil Spector and the Ronettes and the Beach Boys. In addition to the swinging rhythms, rich harmonies, and big-room drums, Pratt carefully ties in all the twisted and troubled context those ’60s hits have collected in the past half century—angelic, impossible, tortured. Pelly calls it California noir; like some David Lynch soundtrack, Pratt’s songs conjure an “uncanny grandeur” that “dares you to wonder what lies below the perfection of its deceptively simple surface.”
Pratt is a folk singer, one with a deft ear for richly textured arrangements, but also one whose singular voice and idiosyncratic songwriting are sturdy enough to hold their own in any genre. Troye Sivan sampled her 2015 song “Back, Baby” for his song “Can’t Go Back, Baby.” Farther afield, Pratt’s latest release is—actually—a collaboration with A$AP Rocky: “HIGHJACK,” a single off Rocky’s long-delayed forthcoming album that also features Jon Batiste. Rocky has said he admires Pratt’s “Portishead meets Stevie Nicks vibe.”
Dan Bejar, of the band Destroyer, is perhaps a more obvious contemporary. Pratt recently played with Bejar on John Mulaney’s Netflix show. Though their “medley” read more like Bejar singing a song that flowed well into Pratt’s “World on a String,” from Here in the Pitch, it was a nice four minutes of music. At the end of Bejar’s song, brief applause gives way to that world-standing-on-its-axis silence. Pratt strumming her cheap nylon-string guitar. Stage lights giving her platinum curls a backlit glow. In a conversation recently published in Interview magazine, Pratt told Bejar that she records her demos alone in a bathroom on her iPhone, and her parts rarely change while the recording studio production swells around her.
More Things to Do This Week
PEDALPALOOZA Booklovers Bike Ride
6PM THU, JULY 31 | IRVING PARK, FREE
The nonprofit library Street Books, which serves the city’s unhoused population, rides bikes pretty much every day of the year—the library is a bike. Well, a few bikes. But once each year they host a Pedalpalooza ride, with a bookish bingo, book giveaways, and a book exchange (bring something to trade). The route is about seven miles, starting at Irving Park and ending at Peninsula Park, where the games ensue.
VISUAL ART Lee Kelly
THRU AUG 28 | ELIZABETH LEACH GALLERY, FREE
It’s always strange to see Lee Kelly’s sculptures inside a gallery. The celebrated Portland sculptor, who died in 2022, was the rare artist who excelled particularly in public art. Even if you don’t know the name, you know his Akbar’s Elephant in the lobby of the Fox Tower and his somehow both angular and swirling abstract sculpture Memory 99 that sits at the edge of the North Park Blocks in front of the Pacific Northwest College of Art. In Cor-Ten Revisited, Lee’s longtime gallery Elizabeth Leach has collected works from five decades (1977–2021), grouped because they’re all made from a favorite Kelly material: Cor-Ten steel, which weathers to a timeless mottled rust. In situ, the pieces look like samplings of the city’s natural architecture, a microcosm of familiar forms excised for white-cube display.
THEATER Belonging
7PM SAT, AUG 2 | WINNINGSTAD THEATRE, $18+
Thủy Trần is an optometrist, a lieutenant colonel in the Oregon Air National Guard, a member of the Oregon House of Representatives serving District 45 (Northeast Portland, including Parkrose), and, more recently, a playwright. Titled Belonging, Trần’s debut, written with Libby Cozza, recounts her own remarkable life—elucidating her experience as the child of Vietnamese refugees who’s worked her way into American medicine, armed forces, and politics.
Elsewhere…
- 10 movies to add to your watch list, courtesy of Portland novelist and screenwriter Jon Raymond. (The Criterion Collection)
- Oregon Symphony creative chair Gabriel Kahane’s love letter to music listings—which do still exist some places! (The Atlantic)
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