A packed house took refuge from the cold in 7th St. Entry Monday night for the sunny stylings of indie pop artist Jordana.
The 24-year-old was a vision of spring with a bleached-blond bob and a floor-length floral dress with puffy short sleeves, perhaps in hopes of manifesting an end to the brutal cold that has been punishing the Twin Cities lately.
“It’s so cold! God dammit,” she joked. “Why do ya live here?!”
Minneapolis was Jordana’s fifth-to-last stop on her “Lively Premonition” tour in support of her latest album, which came out in October.
Its highly saturated, fantastical cover featuring rainbows and unicorns hints at the record’s bright, funky, 70s-inspired sound, a departure from her airy bedroom pop start.
Jordana started her front-to-back playthrough with “We Get By,” an upbeat tale of a finely aged relationship with a sound that calls to mind “Les Fleurs” by Minnie Riperton. Jordana leans into a vocal strength and range not seen much in her previous work, and it carries the verses in “We Get By” into a chorus that bursts like sunlight through clouds.
She showed off her multi-instrumentalism with an impressively expressive violin solo, her bow gracefully flowing across the strings. Even with the impressive musical chops, watching her perform felt like showing up to see a friend of a friend’s band. In between songs, Jordana was silly, goofy and charmingly awkward.
“My last show here was crazy,” she said, her smile infectious. “There was shit everywhere, and I mean shit from a butt!”
Later, when someone asked about her dog, Ducky, Jordana explained he was with her mom in her home state of Maryland.
“He loves his grandma,” she said with the nasally tone and expressive hand gestures of a Donald Trump impression. It was well received by the young crowd, laughing at our terrifying political climate to cope.
The sunny sound of the first half of the album kept the energy up throughout the night alongside the artist’s ceaseless humor.
Even the slower ballad “Heart You Hold” encouraged swaying as Jordana gracefully rattled her tambourine and sang about not taking life for granted.
“Run while you can still carry all of the heart you hold,” she crooned. “Hey, grow into someone who you’ve never seen before.”
After another groovy love song, “This Is How I Know,” Jordana shifted gears into the psychedelic with the album’s strangest track, “Multitudes of Mystery.”
With her back turned to the crowd, Jordana spoke to an imaginary sniveling guy on the backing track who invited her and her friend “back to the pad” for a party.
The song about doing drugs with weirdos just for the high is fittingly the album’s most psychedelic and dreamy, but the dream is shattered with a fart joke halfway through.
Though inane on the recorded version, Jordana’s personality made it charming during the performance.
She also created fun vocal effects by waving the microphone back and forth in front of her mouth at the end of the song simulating the feeling of drugs hitting.
“Raver Girl” is a fun, disco-sapphic anthem that got big cheers from fans, though it stood in stark contrast to the sad breakup songs populating the album’s second half, which were emotional yet sonically one-note.
The encore included a cover of Steely Dan’s “Any Major Dude Will Tell You” and a selection of songs from the “Summer’s Over” EP she released with TV Girl, undoubtedly her most popular songs.
Jordana teased her fans about the trilogy being the only thing they came to see.
“I’ll feed ya your ‘Summer’s Over,’” she sighed playfully as she strapped on her guitar.
And while the songs’ groovy, summertime melancholy did not disappoint live, Jordana had cemented herself at the very beginning of her set as an act worth seeing. Her newer, less familiar tracks were just as good, and her personality guarantees laughing along with dancing.
It certainly made the cold outside less biting.
