Perhaps finest of all is the closing track Mia, the warm glow of valves embraced by stately strings as Jordan addresses her muse, intoning sorrowfully “Isn’t it strange, the way it’s just over? Mia, don’t cry, I love you forever, but I gotta grow up now.” “Even with a job that keeps me moving, most days I just wanna lie down, Sleep it away til it’s nothing and pull the blinds all the way down,” Jordan sings, finding a universal theme in the darkest of recollections.
et al., was the product of a year’s perfectionism and it’s soaked with the cloying weight of depression. The first, Light Blue, is ridiculously lovely, Jordan pirouetting dextrously through a refined pattern, highlighted by dreamy piano flecks and the doleful whir of a cello as she lays bare her devotion: “I wanna wake up early everyday just to be awake in the same world as you.” The next, c. All three are stunning, yet they nearly didn’t make the final cut, with Cook having to fight to keep them from the studio bin. Jordan is a classically trained player who took up guitar at the age of six, and Valentine is at its most compelling and hard-hitting on the trio of ornate fingerpicked folk songs that are dotted through the album. Kept perfectly succinct, the song finishes abruptly on a chord rich with unresolved suspense and a swirl of strings. Glory chugs along on overdriven alt-rock chords for a little over two minutes, revealing the album’s only guitar solo, nine bars of well-phrased ascending excellence. The slow, smoky Forever (Sailing) borrows from Swedish disco artist Madleen Kane’s You And I, Jordan ruefully observing “Nothing stays as good as it starts”, while Madonna is scattered with deft, refulgent riffing and angsty self-reflection as she admits: “I consecrate my life to kneeling at your altar, My second sin of seven being: wanting more”. One minute, she’s evoking the spirit of Elliott Smith, the next driving hard into a chorus reminiscent of Avril Lavigne or contemporaries such as Soccer Mommy and Beabadoobee.Ī pair of bruised pop anthems follow. They reference her return from relentless touring commitments and a 45-day period she spent in an Arizona rehab facility.īuilding on the wholly infectious hook-packed grunge-pop that earned Jordan a place on the same Matador label as Julien Baker and Lucy Dacus, album two is even more tightly-honed, with the young guitarist deploying an impressive range of tones. The 10 songs on Valentine were entirely self-written over the winter of 2019-20, something the 22-year-old is fiercely proud of in an era when ghost writers proliferate in the pop world. She returns with a whole load of fresh perspective after a period of huge personal growth in which she had to grow up fast.