Review: Kassi Valazza, The Louisiana – ‘She scatters sunlight across the stage’

Clearly, when you are on your first proper UK tour, driving around this country is a bit scary.

Oregon singer songwriter Kassi Valazza mutters “you’re all crazy” and tells us about driving on the wrong side of the road. She, very obviously, wants to create a little bubble around herself, one that keeps her safe.

Fortunately, she is incredible at creating a world, wrapping The Louisiana in an old-fashioned, sun-bleached gauze, one that is hazy, countrified and gentle. As far away from road rage as it’s possible to imagine.

Seated and clutching a huge acoustic guitar Valazza is in the UK touring her soon-to-be-released second album Kassi Valazza Knows Nothing.

It’s a fuzzy slice of psych country but live she’s a slightly different proposition. Backed with pedal steel, very subtle keyboards and minimal electronics she weaves a sparse web that plays with the open spaces of enormous vistas.

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Opening with Room in the City, from the new album, her voice is slightly chilly and drenched in echo, the pedal steel and electronics adding birdlike chatter, ironically creating a natural sound-bed from where she can explore her mysterious characters and send postcards from rural America.

The feeling of a natural world is one that Valazza returns to several times over the course of her set. Early Morning Rising drifts in on the breeze, spangled with starlight and just a tiny bit dusty, she scatters sunlight across the stage complete with poppy do-do-dos and a fiercely strummed guitar.

At times she seems like a flower, twisting, turning and searching for the sun. There are moments where she could be Karen Dalton, at other times Sandy Denny.

Johnny Dear, from her debut Dear Dead Days, is a song written for her grandmother, it’s bleakly beautiful, a lonesome pedal steel adding to the saddest of soundtracks.

By now the camera phones are out, a surprisingly young audience desperate to capture something magical, something just a little bit special. The Louisiana collectively swoons.

It swoons again over Rapture, a song about friendship and fire that has the merest hint of the Twin Peaks soundtrack to it. It’s the slowest of slow burns, one that perfectly reflects the wide-open spaces of Valazza’s childhood Arizona home.

Watching Planes Go By is both the highlight of the forthcoming album and her live show. It’s woozily gentle with wonky keys and the gentle tap of raindrops, an Autumnal elegy where the pedal steel occasionally slides towards the psychedelic and her guitar jangles ever-so gently.

For a few brief moments Kassi Valazza made her own world with not a single irate driver in sight. Her world probably features no cars at all.

Main photo: Gavin McNamara

Read next:

• Review: Caitlin Rose, The Fleece – ‘Fantastic pop-tinged country’
• Review: Harbottle & Jonas, Downend Folk & Roots – ‘Americana-tinged and filled with yearning’
• Review: Eleven Magpies, Friendly Records – ‘A health boosting pick me up for all’

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