Review: Dolly Valentine picks apart heartfelt truths on new album, ‘How to Be Good’

Dolly Valentine invites you to take a seat next to her on a crushed velvet settee. Its elegance is only matched by the gleam in her world-weary gaze and a rustic, dusty photo album planted in her lap. Fluttering from her lungs as “therapeutic and joyous,” as she described it, her debut long-player, How to Be Good, stuns as a masterful collection of photographs. Formerly known as Holy Golden with Andrew Valenti, the singer-songwriter (real name Leslie Schott) glues together various over-exposed polariods in true scrapbook fashion ⏤ from life’s many grassy knolls to the shadowy, coolly forlorn valleys. “It’s a whole new world since yesterday,” she sings with a silky tongue on “Flowers on the Highway.

Muted pastels spring up like cherry blossoms, casting delicate pink hues and a nose-tingling fragrance. Valentine’s vocal tenderness is never at the expense of sly, double-paned storytelling, and the lyrical anvil she wields sideswips in bruising splotches. “Your life feels stuck / That’s fine / You’re just not there yet,” she promises, urging the listener to take the glass half-full with “The Time Will Come.”

She desperately scrounges through wreckage wrought in heart-swollen jadedness and the uncertainty in growing old, discarding youth and silly notions like exchanging her high-brimmed hats. Then, on “Stupid Love Song,” she unburies this sharp advisement, “I let life go to let love in.”

Valentine festoons the work with a twinge of regret, a bittersweetness that glows ripe and tangy. “Might as well learn what we can from the past and keep keeping on,” she shrugs, feeling existence’s general erosion and gliding day-in, day-out, very ghost-like, on “Hard to Miss.” How to Be Good, predominantly produced by Ryan Hadlock, with contributions from Sarah Tudzin, demonstrates beautiful needlepoint patterns. Such ornamental compositions are contained within an alarming cohesion; she saddles through a steadfast style that never grows stale or sour. Her stories are torn and weather-worn. Yet she spins in dazzling colors, always vibrant, poised, and refined, and stories of pain, remorse, fear, and cloudy hopefullness unravel with gut-punching perception.

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