Tarpan 2016
Lovesick.
Young singer-songwriter turns her troubles into party patterns and goes up where the others fall down.
There’s something finite about the period at the end of this EP’s title, and quite often that’s how teenagers roll with affairs of the heart, yet for Jordan Hurwitz such a state is a good excuse to get in the groove, especially when the groove is underwritten by Narada Michael Walden. If "Here I'll Stand" – their first collaboration – hardly had a static moment on it, that record’s successor shifts the motion up one gear, and while the mini-album’s title track is shaped as seductive dance, Jordan can fill the space between her voice and piano with mellifluous melancholy to unfold the pining behind “Power” into a spiritual paean to inner strength.
Hurwitz can also display silky vocal delicacy in “Obliterate My Heart” where she’s duetting with Cornell Carter, although the horns of “I Love Your Abs” find her in the jazziest of moods, and the artist’s well-played high-class hooked to humorous lyricism makes the piece so stylishly beguiling and stresses the obvious: in one year, the young lady has grown immensely as a writer as well as a performer. Jordan may careen to a soul aspect of things now, but with some variety thrown in – “Lately repetition seems to bore me” is a key line here – stardom is beckoning.
***4/5
