

Over the course of a dense DIY discography that stretches back to her teen years in Illinois, Asher White has taken a maximalist mad-scientist approach to indie-pop, pitting twee melodies against shapeshifting backdrops of electronic beats, distorted guitars, and post-rock textures. However, during the eerie quietude of the COVID-19 pandemic, she fell in love with the intimate all-acoustic 2012 self-titled debut from LA folk dreamweaver Jessica Pratt, and White’s obsession reached the point where she started to mentally fill in the album’s blank spaces with imaginary new arrangements. That thought experiment yielded this wholesale reinterpretation, which demonstrates how Pratt’s sparse, smoke-ringed songcraft can thrive in all sorts of wild new contexts. White transforms the rainy-day reverie “Night Faces” into a kaleidoscopic pop hip-shaker set to a cha-cha rhythm, and recasts the sunbaked country finger-picker “Mountain’r Lower” as an electric-blues stomper. And where the vibe of any given Pratt tune is effectively set by the first note, White’s versions undergo dramatic mid-song mutations: Her version of “Casper” begins as softly as the original, but it’s eventually subjected to blasts of guitar noise and crashing drums that elevate Pratt’s understated outsider’s lament into a heroic rallying cry. If Pratt writes the sort of songs that gently get under your skin, White turns them into blood-pumping anthems liable to make your heart burst out of your chest.