Jinny's new EP is a piano-lead gaggle of five doe-eyed mid-tempo ballads, four original and one an acoustic version of the opening track. She keeps things stripped down and unassuming. There's little more than voice and piano on much of this EP, with a couple slight acoustic/electric warbles and keyboard blips in one or two places. Given the artistry-killing overproduction on many of her popular female contemporaries' works, this simplicity in her song writing is easily appreciable.
Though the sounds of Salty don't seem to leave a particularly strong impression on me over repeated listens, the melodies do reveal an artist that has an ear for a tight pop melody and lyrics that, though fairly regular, remain tasteful throughout. She gets dangerously close to writing a fantastic song twice on the record- "Hold On" and "Everything" are sweet and pretty, but the tunes aren't quite impacting enough to make them stand out far enough from the rest of the female-pop crowd. "Forgive" skewers the need-for-forgiveness theme over an awkward fast-spoken pop beat; it almost gets out of her hands, but she manages to reign it in with a surprisingly subtle melody line that saves the day by effectively stringing each aspect of the track together. "Crash" features another melody bordering on keenly sweet, but I think the song may overuse its main melody line to the point of repetitiveness.
With that said, I think there's enough zest in Jinny's songs for me to appropriately call her sound a diamond in the rough; add some more starkness here, more subtlety there, keep her standards for musical artistry high, and in the right hands she could become something great.
2.5 tocks
