![]() On songs like “Stick”-an earlier version of which appeared on Habits- the instruments create something greater than the sum of their parts. The album gets its strength from its developed sonic texture and strong melodies. Most of the instrumentals are based around strummed electric guitar, and simple drums and bass. The musicianship displayed on Lush is simplistic but effective. The result is a beautiful, melodic, and heartfelt project that displays significant growth since the release of the Habits EP two short years ago. It has an impeccable production which creates an enormous, but very clean sound. ![]() Snail Mail’s Lush displays excellent simple songwriting. While staying within established indie-rock norms, Now, at only 18, Jordan has lived up to expectations on her expansive debut album Lush. The EP had a DIY sound and showed a lot of promise. Her first official release under the name was the six-song EP Habits in 2016. As “Valentine” so poignantly illustrates, the surest route out of a terrible feeling is straight through its bleeding heart.Lindsey Jordan started her musical project Snail Mail when she was only 15. Jordan’s ability to feel everything so deeply is what previously made her feel like she was dying, but by the end of the album she shows it’s also what has given her the strength to move on with her life. “Gotta grow up now, no I can’t keep holding on to you anymore,” she sings, while a subtle string arrangement creeps in like the first glimmers of sunlight after a storm. “Thought I’d see her when I died,” Jordan sings, briefly flirting with oblivion, “Filled the bath up with warm water, nothing on the other side.”īy the final song, “Mia,” though, Jordan will have begged, bargained, languished and at last begun to accept reality. “When did you start seeing her?” Jordan asks on the breathtaking “Headlock,” a perfect distillation of the step forward that “Valentine” represents in all aspects of Jordan’s songwriting: clear, direct language and wrenching melody used in the service of vivid emotional truths. Jordan’s lyrics are full of unanswered questions (“Isn’t it strange how it’s just over?”), and on a song like the acoustic reverie “Light Blue” she is not afraid to augment them with chords that, too, hang in the air unresolved. She often sounds like she’s just been crying, or maybe still is, and “Valentine” gives off the overwhelming effect that you are listening to someone moving through feelings in real time - that the album itself is an immediate expression of raw, unprocessed grief.Īt one point when Jordan was growing up in Baltimore, Timony was her guitar teacher, and she seems to have inherited (and filtered through her own unique ear) Timony’s fascination with unusual chords and a certain husky grain in her voice. ![]() ![]() Jordan’s voice has changed since “Lush” it’s become hoarse, feral and absolutely heartbreaking. “Sometimes I hate her just for not being you,” Jordan, now 22, admits on the slinky single “Ben Franklin,” a song that finds her feigning a blasé attitude but almost immediately folding and admitting that she’s a “sucker for the pain.” On the sharply affecting “Automate,” which lurches uneasily forward like someone fumbling for a light switch, Jordan paints a piercing picture with a few simple words: “Red lips, dark room, I pretend it’s you, but she kissed like she meant it.” More explicitly than “Lush,” though, “Valentine” is unequivocally an album about women loving women - as well as women leaving women, and women occasionally trying to numb heartbreak via dalliances with rebound women. ![]()
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