Itasca: Imitation of War Album Review

Some people play the guitar like they want to caress it; some play like they want to destroy it. Kayla Cohen, who has been recording under the moniker Itasca for around a decade, handles the guitar like she is feeling her way through a lucid dream, cutting through the fog with bright, exploratory lines. Imitation of War, her first release in more than four years, makes the searching motion of her playing its motivating principle. The result is an album conversant in a certain language of post-punk, dual-guitar rock—that of, say, Television or Pavement—but whose animating spirit lies somewhere else entirely. Over a suite of patient songs that don’t so much stretch out as tunnel inward, Cohen and her band render richly textured guitar-rock dreamscapes that nonetheless feel grounded and immediate.

Cohen’s songs can sound loose and jammy on a first listen. The delicate strummed figure that kicks off opener “Milk” quickly refracts into pinwheeling dual leads—both played by Cohen, uncannily evoking a live performance—before the band settles into a groove, anchored by Evan Backer’s sensitive bass playing and Daniel Swire’s crisp drums (Evan Burrows plays drums on two other tracks). Cosmic doodles of electric guitar wind their way around the spare, fingerpicked “Under Gates of Cobalt Blue.” But after a few listens, you start to feel the contours of a deeper sculptural form undergirding the music. Progressions postpone resolution; lyrics loop back on themselves like truncated villanelles. Cohen heavily favors suspended chord voicings that hover in a zone of harmonic ambiguity. Despite all the dreaminess, the sounds are warm and clear; there is very little reverb or other production shortcuts to transcendence—just a light coating of quavering chorus effect on the guitars. It is as if all the restless motion is happening on the surface of the music, and beneath it there is a vast, taut stillness.

“Stillness” is the first word Cohen sings on Imitation of War, and it returns throughout in various guises. In the title track, she inhabits the perspective of a painter struggling to capture a flash of sublimity; she imagines herself as “a saint there on the chapel font”—which is to say, frozen, carved into a hard surface, potentially martyred. Even this grim form of inertia would offer reprieve, perhaps, from the shapeless turmoil the songs’ protagonists seem to face. They set out on quests: Some “set sail on the maelstrom” and travel the road to El Dorado, while others try for more metaphysical feats, like reaching out to touch a moment and threading tears through a needle’s eye. These songs are dream worlds where such things are possible. Cohen has explained in interviews that she wrote Imitation of War under the influence of Carl Jung, the Swiss psychoanalyst and mystic, theorist of dreams and archetypes. From him, she took the idea that a song can be an “alternate reality” accessible through a “trance state.”