Habit and Lush has this level of honesty and earnestness that this album just doesn't have. That's much more passable when she's fronting a guitar driven indie rock band. I love the timbre of her voice, it's one of my favorite things about this band. She's got very little control over her own voice. Listen to and watch literally any Snail Mail live performance, especially the Colbert one. So this album release has to rely heavily on the Valentine image thing. The problem is she's not nearly the singer that that music sort of needs. It's more polished eletro-pop rock than raw, emotional and honest shoegaze/indie rock like Lush is. But that's the turn this album has taken. I'm not saying she sounds like these singers, at all. She's trying to go for that Billie Eilish/Taylor Swift demographic I think, and Matador is certainly putting a lot of money and effort into pushing this image change.
This album marks a dramatic turn in what Lindsey's going for with Snail Mail. Don’t try to make her pop star just because she’s a young woman. I’m glad you said this because I hope her people making these choices see this type of criticism and take it seriously going forward. I wish I had the skills to isolate and remix this album because her work is so INCREDIBLE. It’s one thing when overproduction happens to an album that isn’t hurt much by it, but I’m of the opinion that some of Lindsey’s charm and shine lies in her darkest and messiest corners. It’s a bummer because I think she excels when things feel dirtiest and this overproduction just feels so wrong. There is so much stupid orchestral background taking over one of my favorite vocal recordings she’s ever done. She performed it on the lush tour and it was great. It’s such a beautiful song with just guitar and vocals. A combination of Lindsey’s new vocals, complex composition, and stripped back sound scape of lush would make the ultimate album. Going forward I see Lindsey’s third album probably being the best if she can take all that she has learned from this one and improve upon it. While I would have liked to hear more upbeat indie rock from Lindsey, it’s also very nice to hear these slow acoustic songs because they are surely the best slow songs in her entire repertoire. The majority of songs are slower Intimate ones and the bulk of the slow songs are acoustic driven. From what I understand valentine is more of a indie pop ballad. I’m not saying this is a bad thing, if anything it’s great that Lindsey has decided to change it up and move outside the box, but if you are going to say lush is good and valentine is bad or vice versa then to that I’d say you really can’t make such a comparison. Moving past criticisms of the album I would like to say that we really just can’t compare this album to lush at all, they are borderline different genre. Like I said before this could have been either Lindsey’s choice or brad cook but I’m assuming this is most likely brad cook and I’m not a fan of these choices at all. I really enjoy Lindsey’s guitar skill and would want to hear these small parts on the same level as her vocals because to me the instrumentation is 50% of a song. There are parts in some of these songs where I get excited because some good guitar or synth sounds like it’s about to come through when in reality it just hides in the back and is cut away after 15 seconds as the song transitions to the next part. Vocals are taking up so much space in these songs that things like lead guitar parts are sent to the back. What I hate the most is how the tracks were mixed. While the addition of things like string sections and piano can add substance to a song, to me there is a right place and a wrong place for that, and snail mail songs feel like the wrong place. My main complaints are random instrumentals filling in sonic space for no reason (such as orchestra strings and piano), and the mixing of the tracks. I’m not sure if this is by Lindsey’s choice or the producer, Brad Cook, but the album is very over produced. She has composed some brilliant compositions and these songs at their core level are probably better than a good chunk of the songs off lush, but then things turn south, for me at least (keep in mind this post is purely opinion). Lyrically and structurally they are all very solid and it proves once again that Lindsey really is a good writer. To get it out of the way, there’s no bad songs. So at first I was upset about the direction the music has taken but being such a big fan of Lindsey I gave the album another chance and have formulated a more true opinion on it.