Marina and the Diamonds: The Family Jewels
Marina and the Diamonds: The Family Jewels
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By Darren Estwick. |  |
Monday, 22, Feb 2010 05:04
By Matthew Champion.
679 Recordings, out February 22nd
What's it all about
The Family Jewels is the debut full-length album from Marina Lambrini Diamandis, better known as Marina the Diamonds (the Diamonds are her fans, not a backing band), runner-up to Ellie Goulding on the BBC Sound of 2010 poll. New single Hollywood features, as does 2009's I Am Not a Robot.
Who's it by?
Twenty-four-year-old Marina burst on to the scene in the summer of 2009, a year after being signed to 679, with beguiling second single I Am Not a Robot and a captivating performance at Glastonbury. Part of a neo-ethereal wave of startlingly talented British female singers emerging in the last 12 to 18 months, the Welsh singer-songwriter straddles some sort of middle ground between Little Boots (less subtle) and Florence + the Machine (more versatile).
As an example
"Oh my God, you look just like Shakira/No no, you're Catherine Zeta/Actually, my name's Marina/Your mind is just like mine/All filled up with things benign/You're looking for the golden lie." - Hollywood.
What the others say
"The closer she gets to herniating herself trying to convince you that you're listening to a crazy avant-garde artist making pop music by accident, the more convinced you become that she's a canny operator writing pop songs and then dressing them up in a multicoloured afro wig and glasses with eyeballs on springs. For the most part, they're really good pop songs, too." - Alexis Petridis, the Guardian.
"She has the prettiness and poise of Cheryl Cole but she's more loud girl than Girls Aloud, an opinionated, sharp-tongued mini-diva who delights in her own contradictions, and knows she can get away with anything if she attaches a big, fat chorus." - Neil McCormick, the Telegraph.
So is it any good?
"Oh oh, I'm obsessed with the mess that's America/I'm obsessed with the mess that's America," Marina sings on Hollywood, the first (new) single to be taken from The Family Jewels and by far the most exuberant track on the disc. The repeated vocal gymnastics the Welsh singer goes through on the track (it gets worse on Hermit the Frog) betrays the fact her pop roots run deeper than most if not all of her contemporaries. She can joke about looking like Catherine Zeta Jones (she does) but it screams Katy Perry and drowns out a lot of the album.
That's not to say that Marina isn't a versatile pop performer. Obsessions is creepily upbeat about a dysfunctional sexual relationship and album closer Guilty suitably edgy ("I'm a guilty one and I know what I have done/I'm a troubled one and I won't be forgiven").
But the flexibility comes at the cost of originality and despite the talent that bursts from every track (I Am Not a Robot still sounds as attractive as it did last summer) there is a lot of musical strutting going on.
Album opener Are You Satisfied doesn't test her undoubted vocal range and sets the standard for the album's disappointing lyrical output. The breakout tracks of Shampain and Mowgli's Road are better but sandwiched between them is the boring Girls, in which Marina's voice sounds at its petulant bossiest.
Outsider and Oh No both owe a lot to Little Boots' high-tempo, while Rootless and Numb firmly belong in the Florence school, bringing the album to a confusingly distant conclusion. There is no apology to framing Marina in a context of her peers, as - and this is the reason why she lost out to Ellie Goulding in the Sound of 2010 - she struggles to eke out her own distinct musical space in The Family Jewels, leaving the album feeling disjointed and a little bit dislocated.
Final thought? Marina is a beautiful talent but she needs to spend less time trying to impress and more time finding her own voice.
6/10