Somewhere in the five years between Valentine and Ricochet, Lindsey Jordan made the decision to turn her introspection inside-out and decipher the world around her as well as herself.
There’s a cosmology to her thinking, in which the world at large is one with the queer romanticism that earned prior Snail Mail albums so many plaudits. Her findings are underplayed by mouth; the album is lyrically teenage – My Maker is a particularly underwritten existential crisis – but a sense of revelation is unmasked by Lindsey’s ability to pitch up her emotions through music.
Revelations, epiphanies, whatever you want to call them, exist lovingly in the mood swings that appear in the middles of Tractor Beam’s verses, mood swings that soak in sunlight and breed big, gasping smiles. There is a clasping, heaven-ascending moment whenever Lindsey approaches Light on our Feet’s title, orchestra et al.
Ricochet is a little like Grace Ives’ Girlfriend in that it regularly sidesteps being your typical, leanly guitar-bound singer-songwriter endeavour, another aspect that charms Lindsey Jordan’s humanism. Her clashing opinions on dependency are met, on Butterfly, by bursts of straining guitar fury on its bridge, like a wit’s end.
Its abnormalities also, quite simply, allow for some fun musical variety. Synths like angry streaks of rainbow are spread onto Agony Freak. The song contains a ‘90s-adjscent, moderately dreamy aesthetic, which Dead End immediately extends by going full dream pop – via likeminded riffs and a shaking background, it’s almost MBV-esque, if ya squint.
The album itself is intently dreamy (see the overwhelmed orchestral swells of the title track) albeit occasionally crushing (the grunge/emo guitar mix-ups of Hell).
Aran Kobayashi Ritch (of Momma) is attentive in his role as producer, with a sort of snip-in, snip-out style of production that emphasises certain instruments at given moments whilst exercising his know-how in the dreamy department. His best contribution is Cruise, the guitar layering of which sounds like an overstuffed suitcase, with stars and other celestial entities ready to tumble out at any moment. He then plays the trumpet.
Ricochet is a resilient singer-songwriter album with complete-feeling song-building and depths of emotion. In tearing herself away from how she would usually assess vitality, Lindsey Jordan’s third album under the Snail Mail banner is less lugubrious than her previous releases. Is it perfect? No, but it perfectly captures the moment in which Lindsey was finally finished arm-wrestling with God.
Best tracks – Light on Our Feet – Dead End.
Weakest track – My Maker.
Rating – 7 out of 10
