Tasha shines brightest when everything has been stripped away. The Chicago musician’s dreamy, fragile songs about intimacy and reminiscence are often given color when she’s fronting her band, who can make her spellbinding voice sound even more so with just the smallest touches. She is also the type of songwriter whose talents are especially apparent when she’s working by herself: Performing solo, she plays guitar so softly that the instrument seems to reel in her voice with a gravitational pull. It’s a fitting atmosphere for an artist who writes so often about the very state of being alone: singing into a void that someone left behind and trying to whisper them back.
The hushed songs of Tasha’s second album, Tell Me What You Miss the Most, highlight the best of both modes. On the spare, acoustic “Bed Song 1,” she opens the album with six cycling notes and a lyric that rides a perfect line between funny and sad, self-deprecation and self-pity: “If I could, I would stay here in this bed all day long/But I quite like the way pretty girls sway to my songs.” On “Burton Island,” she pushes the complexity of her fingerpicking: It’s a gorgeous solo piece that thrives in solitude, moving nimbly yet at peace in a way that recalls Nick Drake’s Pink Moon. The feeling here, and at many points throughout Tell Me, is minimal but unpredictable, sweet but not cutesy, and familiarly structured but not exactly folk music.
On the standout track “History,” Tasha counters the album’s spare opener with an outstanding full-band arrangement. When she barely gets out the words “What’s left of touch?,” her voice seems to make a slight, brushing contact with the suspended chord that it hangs over, like a hand touching a knee under a table in a restaurant. That exact image happens to appear in “Sorry’s Not Enough,” where she uses delicate harmonies to illustrate the nerves at stake in these quiet interactions. Drummer Ashley Guerrero and bassist and co-producer Eric Littmann follow Tasha into subtle, sneaky swells and decrescendos. By the song’s end, they palpitate in between, winding down two steps then rising with a twitchy cymbal crash, ending things in an intriguing state of ambiguity (Tragically, the album is also a memorial to Littmann, who passed away earlier this year at 31.)
Embracing the in-between is a recurring theme for Tasha, in her music as well as the relationships that she writes about. Tell Me What You Miss the Most is a step forward mostly because it’s a step inward: While her debut album, 2018’s Alone at Last, featured a gently distorted electric guitar that sounded wavy and cool, at times recalling her English contemporary Nilüfer Yanya, it also added a sense of distance. On the cleaner Tell Me, she peels off that filter, reaching more often for her acoustic guitar and singing more directly. This quieter side amplifies her strengths, emboldening her vulnerability and her willingness to face uncertainty head-on.
Buy: Rough Trade
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