Kassi Valazza opens ‘Roll On’, a meditative country -tinged ballad from her third album, with a stark realisation: “I’ve made up my mind, I feel like I do”, she asserts over a slow-motion two-step rhythm and thick brushstrokes of pedal steel and fiddle. “And if I feel like I do, I’ll try moving on”.
Her voice is a high, sharp lilt that brings to mind Joan Baez or Carolyn Hester or other folk singers from the ’60s and ’70s, with a gentle vibrato and a gift for windswept phrasing. She sings like the breeze is scattering her syllables like leaves. “Roll On” is a break-up song – with a lover perhaps, but more likely with a city – but she instills the song not with resentment or sadness, but a precarious excitement for a new beginning.
From Newman Street is an album full of…