Ruin Me With Love – Jourdan Myers (Voir Monde Music) reviewed by Dave Franklin

Good music has the ability to cross musical boundaries. Great music doesn’t even acknowledge that the boundaries exist in the first place. By that definition, Ruin Me With Love, is a great album as it flits between avant-garde pop, contemporary folk, soul and a scattergun blast of other genres. Through its 12 tracks it manages to mix an alternative, arty feel with enough commerciality to make it widely accessible to pop fans, music geeks and hipsters all at the same time, never bowing down to one over the other and creating memorable music along the way.

Those that look for artistic comparisons might see her as Conor Oberst’s big sister, with Feist being the first born that they both look up to, the more minimalist moments of the album even drawing comparison with Bat For Lashes. But pigeon-holeing aside, songs such as The Fight and Wanderlust really show the artists singular charms as they sculpt sound rather than follow song lines and act as the centre piece of an album that finds the production and arrangements as crucial to the end result as the songs and the players.

Second albums are said to be the difficult ones and although I can’t comment on the process behind the making of the album, not only is this a fantastic collection of songs that flies the flag for originality and exploration in the usually unadventurous pop genre, it sounds like the work of an artist much further established in their career.