ITASCA

Across its suite of smoky nocturnes, 'Imitation of War' finds Los Angeles-based songwriter, singer, and guitarist Kayla Cohen continually embracing the tangled ambiguities of its evocative title, with its suggestions of artfulness, artifice, and antagonism alike.

These ten sturdy set-pieces represent the most smolderingly electric guitar-forward recordings of Itasca’s deepening catalog. 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. RIYL: Michael Chapman, Bridget St John, Mike Cooper, Steve Gunn, Gun Outfit, Wand, Ryley Walker, Aldous Harding, Weyes Blood, Bert Jansch & Gram Parsons with Emmylou Harris