Today is El Día de los Muertos, an apt day to celebrate Itasca’s captivating, sublime new album Spring, which is now in stores and streaming worldwide. Songwriter Kayla Cohen’s careful, impressionistic prose and swoon-worthy arrangements have earned acclaim from, among others, The Fader, NPR, Uncut, and MOJO, whose lead review lights on themes particularly redolent on the Day of the Dead.
Kayla Cohen directed the video, shot on Super 8 in both CA and NM. “It’s influenced heavily by the opening sequence in Heart of Glass, the film by Werner Herzog, which shows blurred scenes of Bavaria, Germany and Yellowstone National Park, against a soundtrack by Popul Vuh,” she says. Spring is out Nov. 1. Check out rave lead reviews from MOJO and Uncut.
Now available to stream and purchase worldwide. Recorded right before songwriter David Morris moved to a Buddhist monastery in Nova Scotia, and featuring guest appearances from Joan Shelley and Tara Jane O’Neil, the record has earned acclaim from Uncut, MOJO, and notably, The Guardian, who chose it as their Folk Album of the Month, perceptively describing it as “anti-colonialist folk … a wide-eyed, curious creature, willingly alert to the world.”
Itasca has shared “Lily,” the opening track to her forthcoming album Spring, today, alongside a music video shot on Super 8. In an essay for The Talkhouse, Cohen writes about the song’s origins, inspired by the ghostly hallucinations of a water lily she experienced on the long drive from LA to New Mexico, where she composed the songs on Spring. The video depicts a dance of domesticity between mythological figures Ceres (played by Cohen), Pan, and Bes.
Ahead of the release of Abundance Welcoming Ghosts on September 27, hear the album’s third and final single “Red River,” which narrates the history of the language—a creole of Cree, Scots, Gaelic, and Ojibwa spoken in Manitoba—from which the band take their name, and the colonial dynamic replicated in the process: the “narrowing Throat of the World.” Uncut writes the band’s “most sunny and easygoing record to date… exudes enlightenment.”
Featuring Tara Jane O’Neil on slide guitar and premiered by Raven Sings the Blues (with apt comparisons to John Martyn and Fairport Convention), “My Friend” follows first single “Snowdon” (with Joan Shelley) and a solo performance video of album opener “Blue Sparks.” Abundance Welcoming Ghosts is out Sept. 27th.
Itasca, the mesmeric project of California songwriter Kayla Cohen, has announced her new album Spring, due out November 1. The Fader announced the luminous album today and premiered its first single “Bess’s Dance.” NPR Music writes that “Kayla Cohen’s got a voice that glows like the sun at dusk.” Pre-orders now available.
Red River Dialect has shared a solo performance video of “Blue Sparks,” the first song on forthcoming album Abundance Welcoming Ghosts, on which it appears in a radically different full-band form. Songwriter David Morris sent this transmission from Gampo Abbey, the Buddhist monastery in Nova Scotia where he resided after recording the album.
Recorded in rural Wales shortly before songwriter and singer David Morris moved to a remote Buddhist monastery in Nova Scotia, Red River Dialect’s fifth album captures the band finding fresh joy in their music, relaxing more deeply into a natural, playful confidence: tangling with the thickets, wading in the river, digging the peat, and disappearing into the mountains.
The ‘Red River Dialect’ became the English name / For the lilting Mantitoba Métis speech / Heard around the Saulteaux plain. / Like the Michif language, Cree don’t say he or she,’ / But I know that white man’s hunger ate / The speech of the Métis.
