Here’s the video for the second single from Kelis‘s forthcoming fifth album Flesh Tone. It’s her first new studio album in almost 5 years; her first album under her freshly inked deal with the will.i.am Music Group and Interscope and also the first record since she became a mother (by rapper Nas). The DJ Ammo-produced “4th of July (Fireworks)” follows closely behind the amazing “Acapella”, which (not for nothing) topped Billboard‘s dance charts earlier this year. That song dropped the sex kitten act that gave Kelis her biggest hit (“Milkshake”), in favor of an earthier, more soulful vocal reminiscent of classic Donna Summer on a song that was a soaring and spiritual celebration of new motherhood. “4th of July”, accompanied by another visually stunning video, is another song about the transformative powers of love. It may lack a bit of its predecessor’s immediacy, but for “dance pop,” this song comes harder than a lot of what qualifies as rock these days and Kelis has never been more compelling or more disciplined as a singer. It advances the case that Kelis, at the start of her second decade in the showbiz, is making the best music of her career right now; and that, with Flesh Tone, we may be in the presence of a dance pop masterpiece. This is one album I cannot wait for.
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.
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.