If empathy is the wrong thing because it contains a degree of self-fulfillment, it’s difficult to see a more complicated space in music at the moment than being a successful young woman.
From endless third-party discussions of physicality (and sexuality), to revelations of abuse and coercive behaviour uncovered by the #MeToo movement, many who fit this description find themselves in the crosshairs of a situation that offers few places of shelter.
Sometimes the hardest person to convince help is required is yourself, and at the end of last year Lindsay Jordan read the signs and put herself into rehab.
The previous four years had been a front row trip on the industry rollercoaster; as Snail Mail she released her first EP whilst still in high school and Lush, the 2018 debut which followed immediately, drew comparisons to the likes of Soccer Mommy, Japanese Breakfast and Julien Baker.
Growing up on the road however is a difficult thing to do and, as the pandemic has shown, for those who can’t write in the back of a van being fenced in has sometimes proved to be a creative assault course.
Jordan learned to conquer it, writing on a personal guitar amp and, for Valentine, composing string arrangements on a synthesizer whilst spending lockdown at her parents’ house.
It’s this relearning of composition – amongst other tricks absorbed whilst tools were down – that gives her second album a broader creative pan than its predecessor. On Headlock for instance, brass and synths share the burden as fantasies of pursuing a love so hard leave the subject starting to believe they’ll see them in the afterlife.
This transition could be interpreted in one sense as being closer to love as an ideal, and nearly all the songs here deal with its sometimes savage, occasionally thrilling, consequences.
The titular opener goes from dream-like intimacy to the best Snail Mail chorus ever written; the words, ‘So why do you wanna erase me?/Darling Valentine’, coming from someone numbly left holding Cupid’s broken arrow.
Feelings new and old stalk this supposed new world. On Glory – which comes as close to any other here in mirroring the loer-fi approach of her debut – the singer faces down another uncomfortable truth, one where taking command of a situation only leads to less control of it.
All this duress inevitably has consequences. Honest to the point of brutality, Ben Franklin is an outlier with a chorus closer sonically to Annie Clark, but words with which the singer puts everything out there: ‘Sometimes I hate her just for not being you/Post rehab I’ve been feeling so small’.
It’s hard to know whether to come towards a stranger like this or close up yourself. In places though there’s a fragile beauty that’s impossible not to be fascinated by.
The gently picked acoustic guitar of Light Blue frames a love song that seems to have nothing to hide (although it’s now over), but Forever (Sailing) – its unlikely origins in Swedish-model-turned-Chanteuse-Madleen-Kane’s 1979 deep cut You And I – sounds both glacial and hopelessly romantic at the same time, the neatest trick here amongst so much emotional debris.
Damned if you do, damned if you don’t. This is frequently the choice of women in music, a stark and often thankless journey into doing what’s wrong for all the right reasons.
There’s sadly no quick fix for that, but whilst Valentine is an articulate career leap forward for one artist, it could – and should – be a roadmap for many more dreamers following close behind her.
