Lindsey Jordan sounds anguished on the new Snail Mail album, “Valentine.” Where “Lush” felt romantic and energized, “Valentine” is driven by a different kind of energy: break-up and let-down despair, disappointments, jealousies. Jordan sings on “Valentine” about the ways that those wrenching emotions manifest themselves in different wishes and desires: wanting an ex not to forget her; imagining another world where she and her ex are still together; sailing away forever with an ex; consecrating her life to an ex; wishing someone else was her ex; loving an ex forever. Living in and inhabiting periods of swelling and receding misery. Jordan sings about all of this within the setting of the catchiest and poppiest songs she’s written in her career.
One of the biggest differences between “Lush” and “Valentine” lies in Jordan’s voice. On “Lush,” there were moments in songs when her voice showed the intensity of her emotion, breaking slightly, or interrupted with a little gasp (you can hear it in some of the “anyways” she sings on “Pristine”), but her singing on that album was mostly bright and clear and confident. On “Valentine,” Jordan’s voice sounds noticeably older, aged or worn in a way that something left open to the weather is aged—by repeated exposure to eroding forces. On “Ben Franklin,” one of the best songs on the album, Jordan sings “I’ve got the devil in me,” and her voice now, sounding smoky and lived-in, makes the line so much more believable than it would have been before. Her vocal performance on “Forever (Sailing)” is another highlight—she switches between a sweet, conciliatory cooing and a kind of bitter sneer, while her background vocals are masked and slowed down, slurred and tired. “Forever (Sailing)” captures all the melodrama of post-break-up mentality: wanting and not wanting to be back with the other person, indulging in contrary-to-fact fantasies about how things could have been and should have been.
“Valentine” also takes a lot more musical risks than Jordan’s previous work. The title track opens with hazy synths, but then erupts (“Creep”-style) from the quiet verses into the amped-up, big energy chorus. “Forever (Sailing)” also relies on soft-lit neon synths, with the effect that it feels kind of loungy and dreamlike, a half-glimpsed vision of a different world. “Madonna” starts with what sounds like an early Portishead beat and Jordan’s femme fatale vocals, though that vibe breaks when Jordan’s guitar enters with quick, bright strums. “Automate” has wild, intermittent piano that ratchets up the overall anxiety of the track. Jordan’s also got two stunning acoustic guitar tracks on the album, “Light Blue” and “c. et al.” that show off her crazy chops and inventiveness and her knack for marrying her lyrics with melodies and arrangements that work in concert. “Light Blue” is so delicate and sincere, a whispered and tender retrospective, hung on finger-picked guitar and quiet strings.
“Valentine” is a beautiful experiential postcard, a carefully observed and controlled depiction of what it’s like to live through—or drag yourself through—a time of feeling abandoned, lovelorn, desperate.