You imagine psychotherapists probably get heartily sick of heartache – all those infidelities, those ugly power dynamics; the break-ups and the breakdowns that go with the counselling territory. Music fans could well feel the same way. There’s a lot of heartache about. If you could picture emotional baggage in pop, it would resemble some Heathrow luggage handlers’ strike-style mountain of love-gone-wrong songs – a peak only equalled in height and heft, perhaps, by the songs in which fools are falling in love. Or trying to get it on.
The thrush-like Natalie Prass, 28, has written a heartbreak album that reminds you why such albums are so wonderful and necessary in the first place. The break-up happens live, almost in real time. The chorus of the first track, My Baby Don’t Understand Me, was written by Prass in tears after one particularly bad row. Prass later emailed it to her now-ex – who co-wrote many of these other songs – an act which pretty much ended things. Strings weep along with her; horns elevate Prass’s romantic non-contiguity to the level of a minor epic.
Swathed in rococo strings, Christy, a kind of Jolene-style love triangle set in a chamber trio, was written well before the end. It imagines an infidelity that subsequently came to pass. “The only one she sees belongs to me,” sings Prass in a whispery trill full of suppressed drama.
The album these songs light up arrives after a bumper year in which Sharon Van Etten and Angel Olsen set high bars for the American indie confessional. Prass’s debut actually sounds like neither of these, and was finished well before the other two. Spacebomb, the studio-cum-label-cum-string factory where Prass recorded it, have been sitting on this gem for more than two years. Their time was taken up promoting another pearl – Spacebomb head honcho Matthew E White’s own artist album of 2013, which really was the best thing since amplification. Prass politely killed time playing in Jenny Lewis’s touring band and making clothes for dogs. The sultry horns, the groovy strings (courtesy of in-house string arranger Trey Pollard) and the southern sway of White’s record recur on Prass’s songs, which take their cues from old masters like Carole King and Dusty Springfield while sounding as fresh as the hurt in Prass’s voice.
On Bird of Prey, Prass’s ex is one evolutionary step along from a dinosaur, driving her away. A flock of flutes provide sad birdsong. Your Fool is seriously old-school, a waltzing doo-wop/soul nugget so good they included it twice, once as period drama, all vocal flutters and groaning cello, and on Reprise, as spoken-word with neoclassical feints and woozes, groovier handclaps and dubby jazz horns.
Things get funkier and more humid on Why Don’t You Believe in Me, set in the south somewhere between Prass’s Nashville home and the Virginia soil where she spent some time in an eighth-grade band with Matt White. Album closer It Is You ends things with a gay flourish that suggests a Walt Disney animation rather than mutual laceration. But by this point, softened up by the dulcet sweep of Spacebomb and Prass’s pensive artistry, you don’t mind the quirky little pirouette over the rainbow.
