MARINA - Love + Fear

2015's FROOT was Marina Diamandis' best album yet. The youngest of her fans will firmly attest of course that it was 2012's Electra Heart because of it's memorable hits, but outside of those it was a hollow affair full of meaningless fodder and cheap pop. Her debut, The Family Jewels, had her best singles, anyway, so it's a losing battle. But no - FROOT was a fully-realised, thematic hit and packed to the brim with unpredictable fun.

There is, then, a sense of dread when it takes four years to follow it up and the singer has ostensibly ditched the "and the Diamonds" from her stage name. She's black and white, she's not wearing much make-up and she's quite literally stripped bare. Last year's guest spot on Clean Bandit's Baby may have given fans some hope that she hasn't outgrown pop (but not much, as it was a pretty irritating single) but... that hope may very rapidly have been quashed with her fourth LP. 16 tracks of it as well. Yikes.

Her first teaser of this project was promising enough: 'Handmade Heaven' has all of the theatrical, twilit drama of one of Lana del Rey's better songwriting efforts, and finds Marina dangling somewhere observing birds in the trees, lamenting the skyscrapers that "glow like they'll never fall down". It's not the most picturesque or beguiling of openings and it does rather set the bar low for the rest of what's to come. I could go in depth with every of the sixteen tracks but she's handily split the album in two: LOVE is certainly the weaker of the two and throws limp offerings like 'Superstar' and 'End of the Earth' at the wall, hoping they'll stick. I'm generally tired of pop songs where the chorus consists entirely of the title repeated between arpeggiated "ooohs" and 'Superstar' falls offensively foul here. It's almost sacrilege, too, to follow up a fruit-themed career highlight with a track so confused and directionless as 'Orange Trees'; it's penned as a love letter to her Greek heritage but conjures absolutely nothing in the way of nostalgia or romance. It's breezy but it isn't beautiful. I've already mentioned how grating I found 'Baby' - and indeed much of Clean Bandit's discography - so I needn't expound on that.

What strengths are there, then? LOVE offers one or two: 'True' is absolutely a step in the right direction and is full of punchy, seize-the-moment production, playing with the ideas of being an all-out Bronski Beat-inspired electronic opera, or just a cute little club anthem, and settling for somewhere in the middle. But 'To Be Human' is her strongest showing here, reeling off cultural phenomena with a gorgeous vocal and building ever so eerily towards this almost nihilist, misanthropic crux.

The pagodas and the palaces
Dressed in gold leaf hide the damages
Spot the Geisha as she balances
Life's a cakewalk, full of challenges

On the Fear side of the record, she pulls it out of the bag occasionally too. 'Believe in Love' stretches her vocal into a wispy, delicate state that makes her revelations that "I don't trust my head, no I don't trust my damn mind" all the more earnest than had she delivered it in her typical Marina-casually-overlooks-the-world drawl. 'You' is another strong showing, and could certainly slot somewhere in playlists for radio stations quite comfortably, but I would opt for 'Emotional Machine' and its witchy, hand-waving reverie, as her second-strongest track here.

All of that is promising enough until you realise that it's surrounded by such directionless dreck. All three of the closing tracks are without pomp or circumstance, and many that precede it are too. "Don't know what I'm doing with my life, but maybe there's no wrong or right" she ponders on 'Life is Strange' and it's just as shallow and hollow an observation as the craft and effort that's gone into making the track. There's an attempt at self-referencing on 'Karma', too, with the "oh my god!" from her previous hit Hollywood doing its best to distract from some pretty poor lyrics and cliches. She almost goes full Bebe Rexha/Mabel (ie. "queen of everyday mundanity") on 'No More Suckers' with references to her texts and boys staying well past their welcome, and it just all completely undoes any of the enchantments she's done elsewhere. 

I am honestly hard-pushed to recall an album where the artist sounded more disinterested than this example. Though the entire project is saved somewhat by a shift in gear around the middle of the Fear portion, there's still a resounding lack of fun, of vitality or passion in the entire collection. Even chopping and repackaging some of the tracks here without the duds would've still resulted in an 11-track LP that inspires little more than a shrug; will the likes of You or To Be Human be regarded, in five years' time, as Marina classics? It's unlikely.

Rating: 5/10
Highlights: To Be Human, Emotional Machine, You, Enjoy Your Life, Believe in Love
Avoid: Orange Trees, End of the Earth, Superstar, Life is Strange, Baby

Artwork Watch: very much the most obvious example of that "I'm stripped bare. I'm serious now." trope that's quite tiring from popstars
For fans of: the bare minimum

Coming next: Vampire Weekend