Itasca returns to Paradise of Bachelors with Imitation of War released February 9th 2024
Listen to the title track and watch the accompanying video:
On Imitation of War, her first album for four years, songwriter and guitarist Kayla Cohen advances Itasca into rockier terrain, with a suite of smoky nocturnes and uneasy idylls surveying, with refreshing urgency, mythologies and psychologies both classical and personal. Co-produced by Robbie Cody (Wand, Behavior), these ten sturdy set-pieces represent the loosest, leanest, and most smoulderingly electric guitar-forward recordings of Cohen’s deepening catalogue.
"This song was originally inspired by the film My Night at Maud’s, but then became much more than that—the long dialogue scene in the middle of the film where the two leads are discussing religion and self but are also conversationally dancing with and around each other. Then a few days later a friend spoke the phrase "imitation of war," and to me it became a way we operate with each other, imitating peace or war through our antagonisms, intended or not, through the ways we've all learned to be. That's where the inspiration for the title and the chorus came from, and then through working on the song more the story mostly became about chasing the muse when writing music and making art, and then taking on the costume of muse myself. And I wanted to write what for me is almost a power pop/glammy song with the chorus effect on the guitar, and have fun with the riffs and guitar arrangement. The music video plays with the ideas in the lyrics and shows all of the people who have worked on and played on the record in various guises and environments." Kayla Cohen
Aptly, the song “Imitation of War” maps the range of the eponymous record’s domain. Her characteristically ethereal vocals precipitate, among orange and laurel trees, upon rockier terrain than ever before, negotiating a “muse’s crown” and “a snare set by the devil.” The uneasy idyll, set to a brisker tempo and more spirited and spacious band-centered arrangement than most anything on Spring (2019) or Open to Chance (2016), her prior two albums with Paradise of Bachelors, captures the flexibility and finesse Cohen wrings from reduction. Distilled to an oceanic essence of guitars, bass, drums, and vocals, Imitation of War is simultaneously (and somewhat counter-intuitively) her loosest, leanest, and most liberatingy unclad album and her most theatrical set of songs and performances to date.
Cohen explains the titular simulation as the “performance of war postures” evident at every scale of human and animal life. But it could just as easily apply to the revelation that, with Imitation of War, Itasca has finally come to inhabit fully the staged postures toward which former records gestured. She sounds more herself, more confidently authorial than the longing protagonist of her earlier work. No imitation, formal or emotional, of former self or imagined other, remains.
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Album smart link: https://lnk.to/PoB73
