by David Wilikofsky
Open to Chance, the third album by Itasca (aka Kayla Cohen), is a record that’s stuck with me since I first heard it nearly a decade ago. A light, airy take on the Laurel Canyon sound, it’s sun flecked perfection; there are few artists who could sing about “birds diving in delight” and “dancing in the moonlight” without eliciting an eye roll from yours truly, but Cohen’s music manages to embody that idyllic imagery and capture something profound about it. Since that record, Cohen has largely been quiet. She decamped from Los Angeles to New Mexico, released one other album (2019’s Spring), and eventually made her way back to Los Angeles where her latest, Imitation of War, began to take shape. While the album is perhaps the darkest and most challenging record in Cohen’s oeuvre, it’s also one of the most rewarding pieces of music she’s made.
Imitation of War represents a subtle evolution of Cohen’s sound. The sonic markers I most associate with her music (wispy vocals, intricate guitar work) are still front and center, but there’s a clear tonal shift; where previous albums felt sun flecked, Imitation of War is more like a plume of smoke: still airborne, but darker and heavier. In many ways that heaviness feels contradictory, as this album is easily the sparest I’ve heard from the project (Cohen and co-producer Robbie Cody referred to the arrangements as an “economy of sounds”), but somehow stripping the songs down to their bare essence imbues them with more heft. Cohen’s lyrics also feel less direct than ever before; though difficult to parse, their imagery grapples with saints and devils, muses, and the mysterious forces of the natural world.
The beating heart of the album, at least to me, is its ten minute centerpiece “Easy Spirit”. Perhaps the most ambitious composition Cohen has put on record to date, it’s a perfect encapsulation of everything that makes this record special. The song is shot through with beautiful melodies and effortless vocals. Cohen and her backing band are incredibly tight, making hairpin tempo and melody shifts seem effortless. There’s even an extended instrumental jam that slows things down to a snail’s crawl without losing the plot, perfectly building on the push and pull that animates the entire song. It’s ten minutes full of contradictions: restrained and expansive, dense and spacious, sprinting and crawling. And, much like the album as a whole, it’s music that is as magnetic as it elusive.