KAYLA COHEN’S 2014 album Unmoored by the Wind is a well-crafted patchwork of exquisite folk songs. Self-recorded at Cohen’s Los Angeles home and released under the name Itasca, it’s an endless hallway of hushed vocals, gently plucked acoustic guitar, handcrafted hiss, and the occasional bird squawk in the background. Unmoored is as intimate an album as you’ll ever hear—a perfect vehicle for Cohen’s spectral sound.
That’s why the rollout for Itasca’s 2016 album Open to Chance was so striking. The first song revealed by the Paradise of Bachelors record label was the opening track, “Buddy,” an amiable country-rocker streaked with pedal steel guitar and set to a drum beat. Next up was “Carousel,” a slower song built around a repeated keyboard part. And then came “No Consequence,” a beautiful exercise in West Coast Americana, again heavy with pedal steel. The stage was being set, it seemed, for Itasca’s big aesthetic shift from sparsely arranged bedroom folk to a full-band sound as wide as the horizon.