Staff Reviews

Marina & the Diamonds - Electra Heart

Review by Krystina Nellis

Weighed down by too much pseudo intellect and, crucially, not enough amazing pop songs, this is one tightrope act that was always going to end more with a whimper than a great flourish. »

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marina and the diamonds second album, 'electra heart', is not so much a creative leap forward, more an olympian pole-vault over the bar of talented-newcomer into the global amphitheatre of a cultivated classic. two years on from her top 5 debut 'the family jewels', the self-styled avant-garde 'diy artist' has detonated her own experimental past and landed feet first in the future with 'electra heart', a stunningly ambitious, seamless, cohesive and confident sonic pulsar spinning between electro-pop euphoria and come-down melancholia. the album is produced by a cache of old school and a-list producers: dr luke (katy perry) and liam howe (sneaker pimps) but mostly (9 out of 12 songs) greg kurstin (lily allen, kylie) and rick nowels (madonna, stevie nicks, lykke li). a hook-packed stunner with the sonic ambition of a one-woman depeche mode, her onetime theatrical vocals now effortlessly soar between spectral, commanding and towering power-pop, finding her vocal identity in an album about a loss of it. the songs, mostly recorded in la in 2011, were written on-the-road through america in 2010, teased into life on marina's 100 keyboard or sung into her lap-top in the back of her tour-bus bedroom, 'watching the corn fields flying by and making sense of the message that american culture employs; that you can be anyone and do anything, go anywhere and lose yourself- start afresh and forget whatever the truth is'. the song titles tell the story - from throbbing first single 'primadonna' to the robo-pop of 'bubblegum bitch' to the haughty spoken-word soliloquies of 'homewrecker' - a fantasy roll-call of 'fairly vengeful characters'.
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