![]() ![]() ![]() (I challenge anyone to write a better rock chorus this year than the fist-pumping eighth song on this album, “Full Control.”) Jordan has said that, along with Liz Phair, one of her inspirations is Hayley Williams of Paramore: Before listening to her, she’s said in a recent New York Times interview, “I actually didn’t know women were allowed in bands.”Īn adventurer up and down the fretboard, Jordan has been playing guitar since she was 5 years old, and she took some of her lessons from Mary Timony, the frontwoman of the legendary and yet still somehow underrated indie band Helium. Jordan has a voice that grazes the sour side of sweet, which means that Snail Mail’s music has something to do with emo, although it’s big and universal in a way that transcends genre. There is still time to become so many different things. Jordan’s got another year left of being a teenager. And yet in the same breath, she shrugs, it would be fine not to be chosen, because given all the people in the world seriously what are the odds. What a perfect expression of the awe of early love, the ordinary miracle of being chosen by someone out of everyone in the whole world. If it’s not supposed to be, then I’ll just let it beĪnd out of everyone, who’s your type of girl?Īnd out of everything, it doesn’t have to be this hard Take, for example, the bridge of the album’s first proper song, “Pristine”: As a songwriter, Jordan’s perspective is alive to a wide-open sense of possibility, the terrifying and exhilarating empty space that exists in front of youth. Jordan favors loud, strange, dirgelike chords, and there’s something primal about the songs she makes out of them, an oceanic immensity to their force. That’s quite a standard to hold oneself to, but it also explains the huge, operatic, and utterly contagious honesty of Lush. ![]() “The songs all had to have that moment for me where I feel like when I was playing live I could cry,” Jordan said in a recent, giddy interview with The New York Times. “In the end, you could waste your whole life,” she sings to someone she loves, which by the end of this journey could easily be herself, “Anyways, and I want better for you.” But the previous songs have warmed her up, and she’s now opened her heart wide enough to finish the thought. The song is more powerful because it is predicated by that false start-you know the struggle at stake for Jordan to express herself so completely. She gives the song a real title this time, “Anytime,” and the once modest tune now has these hi-fi depths that engulf you in its world. But about 30 minutes later-after Jordan has pulled you through a series of epic hooks and fluctuating emotions that crest and crash as tall as tidal waves-that melody will recur, although this time without the protective glass. Frontwoman and guitarist Lindsey Jordan unceremoniously titles the first track “Intro,” and it’s a deadpan little shrug of a song, just some muted guitar and a melody sung as if behind a fogged pane of glass. There’s a circularity to Lush, the tremendous first album from the Maryland band Snail Mail-a quality that becomes especially poignant when you take the record as a whole. ![]()
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