Jessica Pratt and Aoife Nessa Frances at Howard Assembly Room review: Low lighting and otherworldly vibes
The usually brightly lit sit-down Howard Assembly Room has transformed into something resembling a more conventional music club tonight: low lighting, copious emissions from a smoke machine, predominantly standing audience.
However, if there ever was an event that called for the deep immersive contemplation facilitated by seating arrangements, it’s tonight’s double bill of slow-burn, at times almost ethereal songcraft.
Dublin-based songwriter Aoife Nessa Frances opens the proceedings with a starkly hypnotic solo set.
Armed with little more than a reverb-laden electric guitar, some occasional threadbare beats from what sounds like a vintage drum machine (or a contemporary approximation thereof) and a richly textured voice oozing drama, the hazy, unhurriedly drifting material (drawing from Frances’s excellent debut album Land of No Junction for Todmorden-based Basin Rock label to darker-hued more recent material) is occasionally at risk at evaporating altogether as audience is still filing in to the venue, but close attention to the proceedings pays ample dividends.
As Jessica Pratt starts her beguiling set, the pragmatic reason for tonight’s standing arrangements becomes clear. Despite being by no means an easily digestible mainstream proposition, the Los Angeles-based 38-year old singer and songwriter’s weightlessly floating musical MO has clearly gradually crept from the alt. folk margins towards something approaching widespread popularity, assisted by 2024’s much-acclaimed fourth album Here In The Pitch.
Dispatching 16 songs in just under an hour, Pratt and her impressively versatile four-piece band draw audible inspiration from the brevity and directness of a certain type of dreamy and subtly leftfield US and British folk-pop of the 1960s, but Pratt’s music has moved to significantly more idiosyncratically uncategorisable terrain since the finger-picking balladry of 2015’s On Your Own Love Again (the album’s perfectly formed miniature of a title track is one of the evening’s highlights).
Performing in near-darkness, Pratt and her band infuse the songs with lilting, gentle bossa nova-hued sway that – in combination with Pratt’s nimbly finger-picked nylon-stringed guitar – evokes more than faint echoes of Brazil’s Tropicalia movement.
Pratt’s age-defying bubblegum vocal style could become an off-putting affection in the wrong hands, but the eccentric vocal style is the perfect accompaniment to Pratt’s mysterious and otherworldly, unhurriedly drifting tunes, which nods towards the less grandiose moments of Scott Walker’s early solo albums and the type of cuts that Nico sang with the Velvet Underground, alongside hints of Karen Dalton and Pratt’s fellow LA-based contemporary revivers of lush folk-rock balladry ala Sam Burton.
The band provide enriching colour and shade with judiciously applied and unobtrusive embellishments (jazz saxophone, organ, percussion accentuations and unexpectedly rumbling drum rolls) that elevate the already strong material, and minimise the risk of the performance becoming too one-note and predictable, without drawing attention away from the candyfloss melodies and Pratt’s guitar and vocals.