There’s a bit of irony in the title of Itasca’s third album, *Open to Chance. *Musically, this is Kayla Cohen’s most precise, controlled work to date, compared not only to her early abstract drones as Sultan but even to her last full-length, 2015’s beautifully wandering guitar-and-voice record Unmoored by the Wind. It’s also her first recording with a band, which perhaps explains why she kept a tight ship, lest her subtle, intricate folk songs get blurred or drowned by overly-busy accompaniment.
Thematically, though, *Open to Chance *has an apt name. It’s a record about trying something new and journeying into unknown experiences with eager, if cautious, optimism. The album opens with Cohen proposing a move to the mountains with her mate, travels through observations and interpretations of her environs, and closes with a meditation on how this dream might end. That might sound heavy, and certainly Cohen’s music is serious and often melancholy. But there’s a lot of joy in the way her songs illustrate and embody her thoughtful verse.
Much of that joy comes from Cohen’s guitar and voice, two finely-tuned instruments that are uniquely adept at conveying her ideas and images. There’s always some spring in her acoustic, finger-picked step, even in Open to Chance’s most reflective moments. Her vocals are more wistful and bittersweet, delivered with a fading restraint that evokes Vashti Bunyan’s best whispers. But she also has a bright lilt that suits her open-eyed musings. When it's applied to lines such as “Wonder if I’ll ever turn this around,” or, “I’m rolling in circles again,” it’s equally possible to hear them as hopeful or downbeat. More likely, it's both at the same time.
*Open to Chance *is also engaging simply because Cohen sounds so fascinated with everything she sees. Her purview is mainly the natural world—trees and flowers, sunsets and breezes, mice and hens— but she’s just as concerned with the nature of people. In one absorbing track, “No Consequence,” she marvels at confident individuals, the kind so assured and charmed that they seem unreal. Cohen views them from every angle, but she’s still suspicious: “You tell me it takes time/But I think you’ve got a joker on your side.”
Apparently for Cohen, that kind of self-certainty means the death of adventure. She’s more interested in potentials and indeterminacies, and all the different ways that things could go. In that sense, “Just for Tomorrow” is Open to Chance’s most fitting song. Just eight lines long, it's tinged with regret. Cohen sings, “I once held a faithful dream,” perhaps referencing the fantasy that opened the album, and yet she still celebrates the unknown: “After all there are so many ways/I might have just walked.” It’s that appreciation of possibility, of the paths ahead and the ones left behind, that makes *Open to Chance *compelling.
