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Itasca’s Spring Is Out Today

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, and Uncut, whose lead review compares Cohen’s music to “a handspun fabric, stunning to behold in full, but astonishingly meticulous when viewed up close.” MOJO‘s four-star lead review lights on themes particularly redolent on the Day of the Dead:

“A desert country waltz of unreality that feels simultaneously haunting and heavenly. Spring is, ultimately, an ambient album, an intimate listening experience of transformation but also uncertainty, attuned to the dead voices and silences of those ancient landscapes and the young woman who now inhabits them. Mercurial and avian, it is a hazy path through a dusty landscape of sadness and enlightenment that never arrives at answers or certainties, but shimmers with an eternal mystery.”

Cohen wrote the anticipated follow-up to her acclaimed 2016 album Open to Chance in a century-old adobe house in rural New Mexico. Inspired by the landscape and history of the Four Corners region, the sublime Spring—its title summoning both season and scarce local water sources—dowses a devotional path to high desert headwaters. Featuring contributions from Chris Cohen, Cooper Crain (Bitchin’ Bajas), James Elkington, and members of Gun Outfit and Sun Araw, Spring contains Cohen’s most quietly dazzling and self-assured set of songs to date. With color inner sleeve, lyrics, and high-res DL code.

Watch Videos for “Lily” and “Only A Traveler”

Beguiling singles “Lily” and “Only A Traveler” are accompanied by two immersive and dreamy music videos directed by Cohen and shot on Super 8. The former depicts an impressionistic dance between mythical figures Ceres, Pan and Bes, and the latter draws compositional inspiration from Werner Herzog‘s 1976 film Heart of Glass. Both train a keen eye on the Southwestern landscapes of New Mexico and California.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ry6sGECo5Fc]

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UsZPCxLPpVk]

Itasca Fall Tour

11/13: Zebulon (record release show) – Los Angeles, CA
11/15: Denim Factory – Richmond, VA
11/16: Rhizome – Washington, DC
11/17: Union Pool – Brooklyn, NY 
11/18: Tubby’s – Kingston, NY 
11/19: Dirty Dungarees – Columbus, OH
11/20: Landlocked Music – Bloomington, IN
11/21: The Hideout – Chicago, IL
11/22: Acme Records – Milwaukee, WI
11/23: Moon Palace – Minneapolis, MN

Acclaim for Itasca

4 stars (Filter review). A desert country waltz of unreality that feels simultaneously haunting and heavenly. Spring is, ultimately, an ambient album, an intimate listening experience of transformation but also uncertainty, attuned to the dead voices and silences of those ancient landscapes and the young woman who now inhabits them. Mercurial and avian, it is a hazy path through a dusty landscape of sadness and enlightenment that never arrives at answers or certainties, but shimmers with an eternal mystery. 

– MOJO

8/10 (lead review). It’s a high form of musical travel memoir, melding the beauty of place with a sense of self. Spring is like a handspun fabric, stunning to behold in full, but astonishingly meticulous when viewed up close, evidence that often the most easygoing work requires a tremendous amount of thought and editing.

– UNCUT lead review 

Kayla Cohen’s got a voice that glows like the sun at dusk, and plays acoustic guitar with a nimble yet intricate touch. 

– NPR

These minimalist songs listen like poetry, and look like stunning landscapes.

– No Depression

Full of crisp mountain air and rivulets of gorgeous folk guitar. It’s the culmination of her many years as an artist, welling her writing into a soft breeze of folk that places her in ranks with Linda Perhacs, Vashti Bunyan, and Jackson C. Frank. The record is full of isolation and loneliness, an absolute treasure of meditative bliss.

– Raven Sings the Blues

A set of impressionistic, sun-dappled travelogues. Cohen’s hushed vocals beautifully meld with her terrific acoustic guitar strumming, piano, discreet strings and the occasional lap steel guitar. Sounding both sparse and rich, tentative and self-assured, it’s a dreamlike set, reminiscent of the warmer parts of Joni Mitchell’s work.

– Morning Star

The music mesmerizes, guitars glide on the streams of dappled western light. Perspectives change with time and tides, yet the moments of beauty that unfold on Spring are eternal.

– Folk Radio

A beguiling rumination on the expanses she faced during the recording of the album.

– The Fader

Sublime spectral folk from Kayla Cohen, conceived in the canyons and pueblos of New Mexico and subtly gilded by the likes of Cooper Crain and James Elkington.

– Uncut

Gorgeous psychedelic folk.

– Brooklyn Vegan

Cohen’s pure cactus-water voice and sense of cosmic wonderment … leave intriguing tracks to follow.

– Q

It all suggests the balm of a gentle breeze beneath the bright sunlight, a feeling you’d want to capture indefinitely. Cohen does exactly that, suspending an instant in eternal amber. She is able to conjure up something resembling transcendence.

– Pitchfork

The mellow glow [her music] generates is reason enough to want to bask in its evanescent light for as long as life’s harsher aspects can conceivably be held at bay.

– NPR

Simultaneously spare and complex, observational folk ballads turned psychic and strange by metalstringed dissonance and troubling Symbolist metaphor.

– MOJO

Itasca’s old-soul vocals and antique acoustic guitar conjure up classic folkies from years past like Vashti Bunyan.

– Vogue