With her first album Lush, released in June of this year, Snail Mail has gotten big. She released an EP in 2016 that saw growing interest in her work. Maryland native Jordan grew up writing and performing songs in the local music scene. During the band’s first time in Oakland, Snail Mail dazzled the crowd with its hard-hitting songs about love, boredom and friendship. Her surprisingly sonorous voice filled the cozy room with powerful melodies. As “Valentine” so poignantly illustrates, the surest route out of a terrible feeling is straight through its bleeding heart.After two dreamy and lush openers, Snail Mail, lead by Lindsey Jordan, rocked the house at the Starline Social Club on Wednesday night. 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.
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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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