ITASCA Schallplatten & CDs

Review: On Imitation of War, 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 in Cohen's deepening catalog. Cohen explains the title as the "performance of war postures" evident at every scale of human and animal life, making war itself, or at least the thing we call war, a fundamental fact of existence. 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. This self-knowing sentiment implied in the lyrics of 'El Dorado'; no imitation, formal or emotional, of former self or imagined other, remains.