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  • First Impressions: Marina and the Diamonds

    I have also decided I am the worst kind of artist. I think I am like a half-pop star. Too pop for indie & too indie for pop. Half way house, hellish doom.

    -Marina and the Diamonds.

    Marina and the Diamonds is not a band. It is the stage name of 24-year-old singer-songwriter-performer Marina Lambrini Diamandis. And I think I love her. Marina creates brilliant pop music, ready for the radio, but with an emotional intimacy and a sense of candor more fitting the confessional guitar strummers of the 70s. Incorporating both visual and vocal tics and mannerisms from a broad spectrum of out-there female forebears – the emphatic, naive joy of Bjork, the punk theatricality of Siouxsie Sioux, the faux-eastern European, new wave exoticism of Lene Lovich, the self-doubt and introspection of Joan Armatrading, and, what the hell, Buffy Sainte-Marie’s otherworldly trill – only without coming across nearly as forbiddingly weird as any of the above, and all while sounding like no one but herself. After several singles and EPs, her debut album The Family Jewels was released in February 2010.

    “Mowgli’s Road”

    Like Lady Gaga, there’s something visionary about what Marina and the Diamonds is, for it most certainly isn’t just Marina herself. Gaga may have her little monsters, but Marina addresses her fans as her Diamonds, which makes her stage name not just a play on her given name, but gives new meaning to the phrase “I’m with the band”, implicating those who listen to her music, who come to her shows, who read her (awesome) blog, who buy her branded lip paint and face gems, (and presumably those of us who write fawning admirations of her in their obscure little music blogs) as participants in this ongoing, open-ended musical art project. It might be a little easy to write off this idea of artistic audience-inclusiveness as a Gaga rip-off, but Marina comes by the concept independently, and this is pretty much where comparisons to Lady Gaga end. Where Gaga embraces her celebrity, taking a sort of pre-emptively self-exploitative stance and making self-consciously provocative videos to aggrandize otherwise often silly pop songs, Marina regards pop culture and celebrity – her own increasing celebrity especially – with caution and the kind of curiosity one might have for an exotic, potentially deadly tropical insect, fascination tinged with revulsion. An emotionally charged, cabaret-style cover of 30H!3’s “Starstrukk” has become a fixture of her live show (you can download it for free here).

    “Hollywood”

    While embracing instantly lovable pop melodies, her songs are full of challenges and manifestos in disguise. Her single “I Am Not a Robot” might be a reassurance to a social outcast boyfriend coming to terms with his baggage. But it also reads as a statement of artistic purpose, not just Marina’s, but her audience’s – and, simultaneously, a rebuke of the soulless-ness (not to mention joylessness) of Autotune radio pop fodder. “You’re vulnerable. You are not a robot,” she sings at the end of the first verse. She counters that charge with an empathetic chorus, “Guess what? I am not a robot,” and finishes with a question “Can you teach me how to feel real? Can you turn my power on?” With this song, she throws down a gauntlet for her vision of Marina and the Diamonds going forward. She’d rather be hated for her genuine two-thousand-and-late-ness than be loved by millions for a phony three-thousand-and-eight pose. Yes, I believe this makes her The Anti-Fergie. Thank Diamonds for that.

    “I Am Not a Robot”

  • First Listen: a-ha’s “Butterfly, Butterfly (The Last Hurrah)”

    It’s 25 years ago next month that a certain Norwegian synth-pop trio first entered the Billboard Hot 100 with a song that would become one of the most beloved of its era, and a video that still looks as ground-breaking and exciting as it was in 1985: “Take On Me”. Though a-ha never managed another U.S. hit of that magnitude (or even close), they never really went away. Well, except for that time when they went on hiatus for most of the 90s. But with last summer’s lovely album Foot of the Mountain, and their current “Ending on a High Note” world tour, lead singer Morten Harket, keyboardist Magne Furuholmen, and guitarist-songwriter Pal Waaktaar-Savoy are, in fact, calling it a career. But not without a small postscript. The band will release what will presumably be their last single, called “Butterfly, Butterfly (The Last Hurrah)”, for digital download in July. After news of the new single was leaked by a mixing engineer, the song made its official world premiere on the internet via Warner Music Norway last week. For a good-bye song, “Butterfly, Butterfly” is remarkably unspectacular – just a typically sweet, three-minute, mid-tempo, synth-pop song, with a matter-of-fact vocal performance by Harket well in keeping with Waaktaar’s ambivalent farewell of a lyric: Tomorrow, you don’t have to mean what you say/left without a reason to stay/comes the last hurrah. The single is being released in conjunction with a forthcoming 2-disc retrospective set, and coincides with Rhino Records’ recent deluxe edition reissues of the band’s first two albums Hunting High and Low and Scoundrel Days.

  • Big in the UK: “All Night Long” by Alexandra Burke

    Hey all, remember Leona Lewis? You know, the 2006 winner of the Simon Cowell-headed British talent search show The X-Factor (which Cowell plans to bring to the U.S. later this year)? The British Mariah? “Bleeding Love”? Can it be that “Bleeding Love” is only three years old? Can it be that only two albums into her kid-tested, mother(-and-Cowell)-approved career, and despite an appearance on the soundtrack of one of last year’s most talked-about movies (the song “Happy” featured prominently in ads for Precious), she’s already adrift in has-been territory? There are a lot of plausible explanations – lack of raw talent, not one of them – for Lewis’s premature fade-out. The fact is, she’s sorta boring. And, despite the rubber-stamp of Cowell, who’s ever harping on the virtues of currency and relevance, Lewis is really neither. She’s a pretty cipher with a voice, now lost in a crowd of Autotuned provocateurs.

    Two years later, in 2008, Cowell anointed another pop starlet, then 20-year-old Alexandra Burke – The British Beyonce, maybe, maybe, fingers-crossed maybe? – as that year’s X-Factor winner, beating out stiff competition from crowd favorite Diana Vickers (who’s done quite well on the UK charts since then) and biracial boy band JLS (whose J.R. Rotem-produced single “Everybody in Love” has been flirting with American radio playlists for the last several months without quite breaking). Burke’s winning performance, yet another cover of Leonard Cohen’s revered but oft-abused 1984 classic “Hallelujah”, a song that, due to an intimately overwrought mid-90s cover, fans of the tragic singer-songwriter Jeff Buckley regard as a sacred religious text. Angry at the blasphemy of a common pop singer’s – nay, a common reality show competitor’s -performance of the song, British Buckley fans declared a sort of download fatwa against Burke the week her single version of “Hallelujah” was released, urging the rockist faithful to download copies of Buckley’s version in order to keep Burke’s from debuting at number one on the charts. Not only did the Buckley campaign fail, but Burke’s single sold a record-breaking 100,000 plus downloads in its first week.

    Compounding the irony: Alexandra Burke didn’t really care for the song. As is the case with many (most) Idol winners, that first single sailed on the ardor of a television audience; it’s success had little to do with the direction (specifically, a penchant for Euro club bangers) Burke would take on her debut album. Overcome, released in the U.K. late last fall, boasted collaborations with producer-of-the-moment RedOne (who, she’s said in a recent video blog that she is back in the studio with) and her first non-X-Factor related single, “Bad Boys” featured a guest spot by the reigning king of the club-ready (read: irresistibly empty) rap, Flo Rida. Her latest, which stormed the British Top 10 earlier this month is a great little retro-disco flavored number called “All Night Long”, featuring Miami rapper Pitbull. It seems only a matter of time before Cowell launches Burke here in the States (maybe he’s saving her for the American X-Factor debut). Given that Europe and the U.K. are already three singles deep into Overcome, it’s likely that if and when the album does show up here, it will, like Taio Cruz’s just-released Rokstarr, be a reconstruction of the British album – more a “greatest hits so far/what you’ve been missing” set than a proper debut.

    So here’s what you’ve been missing. For the video of “All Night Long”, Alexandra Burke invited a bunch of pals over to her place (presumably) for a night of music-fueled debauchery, armed them all with video cameras (a la Bon Jovi’s “Bad Medicine” video), and reports back with the results, crayola sunglasses, metallic sequined eyelids, alterna-drag queens and all. Pitbull appears poolside in what appears to be a pre-taped address to the freaky, freaky congregants.