Oxycontin News Blog

But if the disc’s many languid moments only hint at melancholy, the sadness is sometimes implied by an unsullied or touristy perspective. She’s a boy-troubled college girl who has a "paper due on Tuesday," who sings "Ask me out/Do I have to spell it out," or a needy, ill-raised chick conned by her abusive boyfriend’s tender side. The former sounds authentic, the latter smacks of precious fiction; where’s the writerly empathy for the protagonist? "What a Way to Die," the pro-booze chestnut by Suzi Quatro’s old Pleasure Seekers, is wonderfully innocent in Jean’s gradual croon. But it’s an odd cover choice, as miscast as Byrds-era Gram Parsons covering Merle Haggard’s "Life in Prison."

At times, Valley borderlines the kind of bedroom self-importance that is so often Garagebanded into the MySpace nebula; the world doesn’t need another singer-songwriter who isn’t digging deep, documenting life with the sorrow, the joy and the wisdom from experience. But Jean is young (she’s done a handful of gigs), skilled and capable of communicating degrees of emotion. It’s a good debut and Jean’s bright of promise.

This is cache, read story here