Kassi Valazza lights up a psychedelic haze whereas ‘Watching Planes Go By’ : #NowPlaying : NPR

I like songs about plane-spotting greater than better-known hits about truly being within the air. Props to “Leaving on a Jet Airplane” for elevating heartache and “Eight Miles Excessive” for reaching peak altitude, however I will at all times favor a heart-worn tune and a few lyrics about dreaming, wishing and by no means fairly getting off the bottom. A plane-spotting music can flip joyful, however extra typically it lingers in that all-too-human area of tenuous hope: not fairly letting go of somebody leaving, nearly managing to take a subsequent step your self.

Portland, Ore.-based singer-songwriter Kassi Valazza captures a fluctuating melancholy completely on “Watching Planes Go By,” a standout monitor from her enrapturing second album, out now on the West Coast’s best little label, Fluff & Gravy. Kassi Valazza Is aware of Nothing sees the Arizona-born artist buying and selling in her twang, equivocally, for a hazy psychedelia extremely evocative of late-Sixties English people music and its Laurel Canyon counterparts, particularly early Joni Mitchell. “Watching Planes” invokes Mitchell’s “Michael From Mountains” with a major character who’s eager for vistas past his window. Within the music, Valazza’s Michael is, like Mitchell’s, a free spirit — however he is been grounded by a damaged foot, an earthly calamity that evokes a reverie about accepting limits and sustaining perspective. The magnificent swirl of sound and lyrical poeticism that Valazza and cosmic Americana band TK & the Holy Know-Nothings construct round this glimpse of a man wanting skyward turns the music transcendent. To cite one other heady child who loves aerial metaphors, if flying on the bottom is flawed, Valazza’s gonna make it proper.