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Thursday, June 14, 2018
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
ARTS

‘Lush’ resonates 
with youth, pride

MUSIC REVIEW

It’s not like this needs to be 
restated, but being a teenager 
is cool. Adolescence is full of 
unnecessarily 
intense 
and 
embarrassing 
experiences 
that 
shape the rest of your life. It’s 
often forgotten though, in the race 
to grow up, the odd beauty and 
shame of that period of your life. 
Things are put aside, left for years 
down the road, to be expressed in 
the words of someone a little older 
and wiser — but not for Lindsey 
Jordan of Snail Mail. Her debut 
album Lush is a remarkably candid, 
emotionally developed record that 
speaks to and from a teenage heart.
What separates Jordan from your 
average adolescent with a guitar 
and a taste for rock 
music is her ability to 
create songs that are 
aware of their emotion 
and power, but never 
get too self-absorbed. 
“Pristine” is one of the 
finest examples of this: 
Jordan repeatedly dismisses her 
feelings with “anyways, anyways,” 
but she’s still going to say and ask 
for what she wants. In the chorus 
she whines “and I know myself 
and I’ll never love anyone else,” 
but in the outro she finds peace, 
saying “I’ll still love you the same.” 
The 
acknowledged 
melodrama 
of “Pristine” is a perfect teenage 
moment, that experience of being 
15 when everything is new and 
awful and exciting, when there’s 
always something to feel.
Jordan still remains first and 
foremost a guitarist, and Lush is 
rife with moments of plush guitar 
playing that don’t make a big deal of 
themselves. “Heat Wave” springs 
to life with a convulsive riff that 

cuts right through the track and 
gets everything going. The picking 
pattern on “Let’s Find An Out” is 
as contemplative and pained as the 
sentiment behind the song. The 
slogging chords of “Deep Blue” pair 
well with Jordan’s wails of “it took 
so long to know someone like you.”
The core of Lush lies in the 
three-track run of “Let’s Find An 
Out,” “Golden Dream” and “Full 
Control,” where Jordan is at her 
most energetic and dynamic. “Let’s 
Find An Out” is one of the most 
poignant tracks on the album, 
which is surprising considering 
its brevity and lack of chorus. 
In it, Jordan mourns a stagnant 
relationship, struggling to find a 
resolution. On “Golden Dream,” 
a little more up-tempo, Jordan 
remembers who she is, finds an 
answer within herself 
and delivers one of 
the 
most 
cutting 
lines on the album: 
“God 
around 
your 
neck, he never did too 
much for you.” “Full 
Control” finishes this 
self-affirming trio, where Jordan 
asserts she’s her own person: “Even 
when it’s love, / Even when it’s not.”
Lush gets a little weighed down 
at the end, with “Deep Blue” and 
“Anytime” being both some of 
the longest and slowest tracks on 
the record, but it’s not enough to 
leave a real mark on the album’s 
quality. On “Deep Blue,” Jordan 
repeats a phrase from “Pristine” 
almost 
word-for-word: 
“We 
can be anyone.” The repetition 
is infrequent enough to be a 
mistake, but the phrase seems like 
a summary of Lush as a whole — 
standing on the edge of adulthood, 
full of energy and emotion and 
the realization that life has hardly 
started.
“Dietland”

Episodes 1-3

Mondays at 9 p.m.

AMC

MATADOR

The 
world 
envisioned 
by 
Marti Noxon’s new AMC series 
“Dietland” feels both frighteningly 
real and achingly distant. It’s 
a world filled with the usual 
indignities women are subject 
to — street harassment, body 
image issues, ageism. But it’s also 
a world that considers a radical 
new possibility: What if women 
stopped putting up with this shit? 
What would happen if they fought 
back?
We’re introduced to this world 
by Plum Kettle (Joy Nash, “Twin 
Peaks: The Return”), a plus-sized 
writer living in New York City 
where she ghostwrites an advice 
column for Kitty Montgomery 
(Julianna Margulies, “The Good 
Wife”) — the “skinny wax Dracula” 
who edits Austen Media’s teen 
style magazine Daisy Chain.
Kitty is polished, ruthless, 
unapologetic. Plum is not. A 
lifetime of being overweight has 
left her insecure 
and 
self-loathing. 
In a montage in the 
first episode, she 
recalls the myriad 
of 
unsuccessful 
fad 
diets 
and 
superfoods 
she’s 
subjected 
herself 
to.
Her hope now is an expensive 
lap band surgery, after which she 
dreams of a skinny, glamorous life 
as “Alicia,” her biological name and 
post-weight loss alter ego. Until 
then, an on-screen illustration 
shows she’s confined to life in a 

Penrose triangle of sorts: home, 
café, “Waist Watchers” meetings, 
and repeat.
Then one day, Plum receives 
a suspicious invitation to the 
basement of the Austen Media 
building. She’s been sent for by 
Julia (Tamara Tunie, “Law and 
Order: SVU”), the manager of the 
beauty closet, who asks Plum to join 
her underground crusade against 
the 
“dissatisfaction-industrial 
complex” which magazines like 
Daisy Chain perpetuate.
“They get us to pay them to tell 
us how broken we are, and then we 
pay for the products to fix it,” Julia 
says. “But we’re never fixed.”
In the backdrop of this mini-
resistance lies a guerrilla group 
called Jennifer: A radical women’s 
guerilla group that kills rapists and 
abusers before dropping them onto 
city sidewalks from airplanes. So 
clearly, there’s a lot going on.
That’s not necessarily a bad 
thing — the frenzy of “Dietland” 
is part of its charm. But it can be 
overwhelming, even off-putting, 
when a show tries 
to do so much 
and say so much 
while 
already 
throwing the rules 
of 
conventional 
storytelling 
out 
the window.
Fun, 
disorientingly 
illustrated 
sequences and surreal flashbacks 
are sprinkled throughout. The plot 
too is somewhat of a Trojan horse, 
the story of a gruesome vigilante 
group wrapped to look like some 
mild lesson on body acceptance 
and self-love.

It’s exactly the sort of strange, 
genre-bending, category-defying 
work you might expect from 
showrunner Marti Noxon, whose 
“UnREAL” 
and 
“Girlfriend’s 
Guide to Divorce” manage to 
transform from mindless fluff to 
dark humor to female rage without 
missing a beat.

Beneath all the noise, the show 
is lovingly and tenderly acted 
by Joy Nash, whose Plum might 
feel flat or dull were it not for the 
actress’s earnestness and nuance. 
As Kitty, Julianna Margulies is a 
comedic treat (and wears a wig far 
campier than her Alicia Florrick 
wig).
It’s glaringly obvious from their 
performances that — though the 
dream sequences and cartoons 
are fun — the show could stand 
to let its stars shine a bit more. 
For a show about empowerment 
and self-acceptance, “Dietland” 
doesn’t seem very confident in 
itself.

‘Dietland’ serves up some 
revenge fantasy with flair

AMC

MAITREYI ANANTHARAMAN
Daily Arts Writer

Lush

 Snail Mail

Matador

JACK BRANDON
Summer Managing Arts Editor

“That’s not 
necessarily 
a bad thing. 
The frenzy of 
‘Dietland’ is part 
of its charm.”

TV REVIEW

