Some people play the guitar like they want to stroke it. some play like they want to destroy it. Kayla Cohen, who has been recording under the name Itasca for nearly a decade, handles the guitar as if 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, marks the beginning of her quest to play. The result is an album that knows a certain language of post-punk, dual-guitar rock – say, TV or Pavement – but whose driving spirit lies somewhere else entirely. Over a suite of patient songs that don't so much stretch as tunnel inward, Cohen and her band render dreamscapes with rich guitar textures that nonetheless feel grounded and immediate.
Cohen's songs can sound loose and confusing on first listen. The delicate figure that begins opener “Milk” quickly refracts into double leads—both played by Cohen, uncannily evocative of a live performance—before the band settles into a groove, anchored by Evan Backer's sensitive bass and crunchy drums by Daniel Swire Evan Burrows plays drums on two other tracks). Cosmic electric guitar doodles swirl around the spare, plucked “Under Gates of Cobalt Blue.” But after a few listens, you begin to sense the contours of a deeper sculptural form beneath the music. Advances postpone resolution. The lyrics come back on themselves like truncated villas. Cohen strongly favors suspended chord voicings that hover in a zone of harmonic ambiguity. Despite all the dreaminess, the sounds are warm and clear. there's very little reverb or other production shortcuts to overcome – just a light coating of quavering chorus effect on the guitars. It's like all the restless movement is happening on the surface of the music, and underneath there's a vast, taut stillness.
“Stillness” is the first word Cohen sings Imitation of War, and returns in various forms. In the title track, he lives the perspective of a painter struggling to capture a glimmer of excellence. she imagines herself as “a saint over there in the chapel font” — that is to say, frozen, carved into a hard surface, potentially martyred. Even this bleak form of inactivity would, perhaps, offer relief from the formless turmoil the songs' protagonists seem to be facing. Quests have begun: Some “go into the vortex” and travel the road to El Dorado, while others strive for more metaphysical feats, such as reaching out to touch a moment and drawing tears from the eye of a needle. These songs are dream worlds where such things are possible. Cohen has explained in interviews he has written Imitation of War under the influence of Carl Jung, the Swiss psychoanalyst and mystic, theorist of dreams and archetypes. From him, she got the idea that a song can be an “alternate reality” accessed through a “trance state”.
