Natalie Prass Stole Our Hearts At The Music Hall

Richmond, Virginia’s angelic songbird Natalie Prass came back to bless NYC with a gorgeous set at Brooklyn’s Music Hall of Williamsburg, proving that she’s come a long, long way in just a year’s time. A she noted during the show they have been on the road since January this year when she released her first full LP, and now the huge tour was finally almost at an end, and although they should be exhausted by this point, she was somehow still positively jubilant to be on stage.

Durham, North Carolina’s Loamlands opened up the show with a rowdy folk/country/Americana/southern rock sound. Lead singer Kym Register is a real pistol, and a times a shotgun, full of vivacious energy and packing some serious vocal and lyrical firepower while a nicely expansive band rounds out a beautifully full powder keg.

Loamlands

Natalie Prass is an overwhelming presence to behold on stage; she is stunningly beautiful, abundant in glowing spirit, and sings a song with a slow-burning soul with strong country essence, and an exotic chi. She admitted during the show that she had never heard country before moving to Nashville from Cleveland as a youth, but was taken by the likes of Dolly Parton and Dusty Springfield, and the comparison in sound and influence is certainly fitting. She has a voice that echoes of many other great modern alternative country-ish female singers like Sharon Van Etten, Angel Olsen, Courtney Barnett, and Molly Hamilton of Widowspeak to name a few, but she definitely sets herself apart from the pack with an animated and vivacious on stage persona. Her harmonies swell into vocal climaxes that produce goose bumps, lumps in your throat, and sweaty orgasmic fevers.

Natalie Prass

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She released her first full-length self-titled album just earlier this year, from which she played most of over the set, with “Your Fool,” “Never Over You,” “Bird of Prey,” and “My Baby Don’t Understand Me” being major stand outs and proof of why her debut is so stunning. However, just this month, she already released her fourth EP called Side by Side which is mostly made up of covers, from which she played a surprisingly up-tempo version of Simon & Garfunkel’s “The Sound of Silence” as well as a mystifying cover of a Janet Jackson tune by the name of “Any Time, Any Place.” Probably the most surprising moment of the night is when she came out for an encore and rocked everyone a remarkably straight-forward version of The Supremes’ “You Keep Me Hangin’ On” which she claimed not to have played for a long time, but pretty much blew my mind.