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electrasarchive · 5 days ago

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August 7, 2011

HELLO. Hiya!

How are you? I’m very good. I’m in a coffee shop on [happening East London’s] Curtain Road. You didn’t fall asleep again did you?

EDITOR’S NOTE: Marina is referring to a phone interview mishap during the promotion of her first album when Popjustice fell asleep and was woken by the sound of Marina ringing for her phone interview. No questions had been written, chaos ensued, the interview didn’t run.

No, there are some actual written-down questions this time. Oh that’s a relief, I can never tell if it’s just a catch up chat or a real interview, so…

Well this is a bit of both. You’re putting a new song online today, so hopefully you can explain what’s going on. Yes.

So what’s going on? What’s all this Electra Heart business? What’s ‘Fear & Loathing’? Well, today I’m releasing a song called ‘Fear & Loathing’. It’s not a single, it’s just an album track. And basically Electra Heart is a story. I don’t even know if it’s going to take the form of an album yet, but it’s a really cinematic 70s Americana-type film and each part of the story comes in Part One, Part Two, Part Three. The song that’s going online today is Part One. It’s quite hard to explain because I think a lot of people will think Electra Heart is an alter ego or something but she’s not, it’s kind of basically a vehicle to portray part of the American dream, with elements of Greek tragedy and that’s all going to be coming out through the visuals. It’s hard to explain but I think you’ll see it when it all comes together.

Okay. So she’s a kind of character through whom you’re telling… Some stories about yourself? Or is it all about her? Er… Well yeah I suppose it’s my view, as someone who’s not American, of the American dream.

Right. I’m obsessed with it all. I just love the side of it that’s really vapid and hollow. And that’s kind of what I’ve really explored. The whole album is around that.

Do you think that level of vapidity and hollowness is something that you just find in America? You say you’re on Curtain Road now, you wouldn’t have to go far to find something pretty vapid and hollow in East London… (Guffaws) Well it’s in all of us, isn’t it? Everyone’s vapid to a degree, just like not everyone is 100% pure and innocent or kind.

Er, hello? Speak for yourself! Oh HA HA HA — shut up! But everyone drifts through different characters every single day, based on the context of the situation they’re in.

This might sound a bit combative and it’s not meant to but do you not feel that you made this point in ‘Hollywood’ on your last album? Yes, but I was more celebrating the kitsch, glamorous element whereas with this the imagery is totally different. It’s still based on… Actually, have you seen the [UPCOMING TRACK WHOSE TITLE WE HAVE BEEN ASKED TO WITHHOLD FOR THE TIME BEING] video yet?

No. Okay, well that’s like a really 70s thing, it’s set in the desert… I just think every artist always has something at the core of them that fascinates them and inspires them. In the beginning I had exactly the same thought — “oh God, I’m still inspired by America, I don’t want to make ‘Hollywood Pt II’”. And it’s not like that. I’m just really inspired by that topic and that culture and I think I always will be. It’s kind of like how every longterm artist always has a thread running through their image, or their lyrics, and that’s mine. America.

But America’s fifty states, there are so many different Americas… The Las Vegas subtext of ‘Fear & Loathing’ feels like a pretty easy target with the whole ‘vapid’ theme, and there are plenty of places in America that aren’t vapid… No, there are, you’re right. That’s what I want to explore. I want to explore the side that has nothing to do with glamour, and that’s all about loss and failure, and that’s more apparent now with the American economy and stuff like that. But that image, that illusion we have of America really fascinates me.

You’ve spent a lot of time in America so it’s been around you, but it feels funny that as a UK artist, and you’re sitting in London now, well, there’s a lot happening in the UK that’s inspirational enough. Economy, riots, Cher Lloyd at Number One… These are turbulent times. (Laughs) I agree, it’s shocking.

I mean people are going to write amazing songs about what is happening right now. Actually let’s be honest, lots of people are going to write fucking awful songs about what’s happening right now, but… What, about the looting?

There are just going to be a lot of people who decide that they’re going to try and come up with their attempt at a ‘Ghost Town’ to capture the mood of the nation. Probably, but lyrically, well, I’m not a political person. I definitely draw inspiration socially and culturally, but I’m not someone who’s like ‘I’m for a revolution’. It’s more about fantasy.

How is the fantasy element present in your new project? Well for one it’s painted as a modern day tragedy — that’s quite fantastical. It’s painted as a play, like a film. It’s about living. It’s just my nature, I’m really overly dramatic.

And these songs that are going to be appearing. There’s one today, and then there’s… The banger.

Yes the banger. So this album, or collection of songs or whatever it is, they tell a story… Yes.

So are you releasing them in order, with each song as a chapter to tell that story? For example with ‘Fear & Loathing’ [the video] I didn’t want to just pop up going (cheesy voice) “HEY!!!! I’M BACK EVERYONE WEARING A WHITE BLONDE WIG, I’M A POPSTAR!!!!”. I wanted it to be artistic, and it’s turned out that way. So ‘Fear & Loathing’ has turned out to be the transition into the antithesis. Like everything I’m not, that’s what I’m becoming.

Hm… The whole idea, the whole notion of pop culture and especially pop music is ALL based on illusion. And portraying yourself as something more exciting than you are. And my heart is always against that. So that’s why I’m doing it. I’m SO against it that I almost have to play the part. Does that make sense to you?

Sort of, but… Are you not overthinking it a bit? (Laughs) People say that to me every day. Just generally! (Laughs)

Can you explain again, in a short sentence, what’s going on? To make it absolutely clear. Okay. Electra Heart is the antithesis of everything that I stand for. And the point of introducing her and building a whole concept around her is that she stands for the corrupt side of American ideology, and basically that’s the corruption of yourself. My worst fear — that’s anyone’s worst fear — is losing myself and becoming a vacuous person. And that happens a lot when you’re very ambitious. Does that make sense a bit more?

Yes. And that’s why it’s imperative that she’s blonde. I wanted it to be really unnatural. Like, I’ve rejected everything of myself.

Is this not just you finding a way to distance yourself from something you’ve made but you’re not happy with? (Pause) Dunno! Isn’t that what ALL music is about? (Laughs)

But not all popstars come along with their second album and go, ‘do you know what, I don’t like this so I’m going to invent a character to subvert it and turn it in on itself’. If you pin it on an alter-ego or a character it becomes cliched and it really isn’t that — I want it to be like a film, where you follow this character on a journey.

So the start of the journey that you see with the first ‘Fear & Loathing’ video… You see her cutting her hair. What does this symbolise? Change.

Okay. (Roars with laughter) Sorry, you crack me up.

What? No, it’s fine, carry on. So that represents change…

Er… Okay. But nothing more than that? No, I suppose questioning who you are?

But the point is that most popstars come back with a new haircut when they release their new album. Like Example. He’s got a popstar haircut now, but didn’t have one before. Yes.

And popstars don’t usually come back going, ‘ooh, here’s a video of me cutting my hair in black and white’. And that’s because they like to facilitate the illusion. But I’m not interested in maintaining that. I’m interested in deconstructing it. Like with the [UPCOMING TRACK WHOSE TITLE WE HAVE BEEN ASKED TO WITHHOLD FOR THE TIME BEING] video it starts off and it’s very kind of Mulholland Drive / Paris, Texas, that kind of vibe, and I’m actually filming myself putting on the wig, but I don’t care that it’s ‘ruining the illusion’. That’s the whole point — you’re becoming something you’re not.

Can’t you just do a nice pop song? (Laughs) (Stop laughing) (Laughs again) Am I meant to answer that?

Do you need to make this so complicated? (Pause)

Or is it me that’s making it too complicated by asking too many questions? I think so. I think you’ll understand when you see the second video. I don’t think it’s complicated at all, actually, but maybe that’s because I’ve heard the rest of the album. Think of your favourite artists who have very specific visions. If you’d listened to just one of their songs then interviewed them based on that one song, you might not have understood the whole thing.

‘Fear & Loathing’ starts off with you singing in the first person, then by the chorus you’re singing in the third person. Who’s the ‘I’ and who’s the ‘you’? (Laughs) Well I’m always talking to myself, in every song, that I’ll ever write, in my life. (Chortles at length) I like to say it’s about relationships just to look a bit more normal, but it never is! (Laughs) No, but it’s definitely to myself.

But to clear this up — it’s not you talking to Electra Heart or anything like that. No. Electra in my head is not like this real person. I don’t want it to be like a cringey alter-ego, because I don’t feel that it is.

So is it more like Plan B and Strickland Banks? I don’t know. I guess there are parts of it, just like with Strickland Banks… You could relate it to David Bowie I suppose. I think artists have a tendency to have different personalities, or maybe everyone does I don’t know, but I think artists are maybe more vivid about how they articulate different parts of themselves. But even if you look at the first album, the way in which I wrote was very much in a storytelling manner. I think this is now a distillation of that, if you know what I mean.

That does make sense. You know the line in ‘Fear & Loathing’ about trying to have it all but ending up with not very much at all? Could you give an example of when that has happened? Yes. I mean, you know my personality I think. It just seems like people who don’t try in life, it kind of works for them. But because I wanted it so badly on my first album, and also because I’m a bigmouth and I like to say ridiculous things, when you don’t meet your own expectations or you don’t achieve the things you’ve said you want to achieve, you feel like a failure. And quite frankly I still am in my head, because I know where I want to go.

The first album felt a bit like a second album. There was a self-consciousness to it. Or maybe a self-awareness to it, but there was a quality that you rarely get on a debut album. It’s usually album two before people start responding to the world’s response to them. And the first album is usually unaware of the reality of what’s to come. Like, you know how an element of self awareness is one of the things that separates us from the animals? It feels like debut albums have a more animalistic feel, and you never had that. Er… Yeah.

That didn’t make very much sense did it. I don’t know if it’s a compliment or not but I’m going to go with ‘not’.

It wasn’t meant as a criticism, but it just feels as if we have missed your innocent phase because even while you were recording your debut album you were straight into music industry hell. There was no innocence! Actually, quite frankly, there WAS. Because I wrote, for example, ‘Hollywood’ a year and a half before I was signed. And it’s funny actually because people will always try and pick holes in things like that. When it was a single ‘bloggers’ were going “oh she’s sold out”, and I was like, “what are you going on about? I wrote that on a £200 keyboard two years ago”. So I think I had an innocent phase but maybe I’m just the sort of person who feels like people are watching.

Well people ARE watching. Yes. Good!

The idea of trying to have it all seems relevant to [UPCOMING TRACK WHOSE TITLE WE HAVE BEEN ASKED TO WITHHOLD FOR THE TIME BEING], because it’s very much a Marina song in lots of ways but in other ways it sounds a lot like a 2011-era hit single. Yes I think it does and it’s not something I’ve done before. If this was a year ago I don’t mind saying now that I would have been, like, “no way am I doing this”. I was not even up for working with anyone. This is why these two songs fit really well together actually, because ‘Fear & Loathing’ is about genuinely not feeling bitter or crazy or jealous any more (nervous laugh) and actually feeling a lot better off for it. And so I’ve been working with a lot of other people. I’ve been working with Dr Luke, Stargate, and I’ve learned SO much. And I’ve done an album — well, it’s nearly done — that’s so exciting and feels like a real album. I just think, if I’d sat in my bedroom and carried on as I was because I thought that equalled credibility, I don’t think I would have produced a good album. With Stargate the production is the antithesis of everything I’ve done so far, but I think you have to try [line breaks up]. And I really like the song now. I’ve really grown into it!

So you didn’t like it to start with? No, I did… But we originally composed it to this sort of guitar dance track. Then on the last night of working with them someone from Amsterdam sent in an instrumental to a different girl that didn’t work. And then Tor [from Stargate] was like, ‘oh my God, what if we turn put it underneath that track’, and I was like, ‘hm…’, and then we did it and it sounded amazing. And I really wanted to go with it. This is like the only time I would have released that song, I think. End of the summer… Before I have an album out. It’s not the sort of song that would be the lead single for an album.

What do you think your fans are going to make of it? I think some people will hate it and some people are going to love it.

Some of your moaning fans are going to go fucking mental! Probs! But writing to your fanbase is the worst thing you can do, so I’m never going to do that. But in terms of your vocals, and the melodies, and the lyrics, it’s completely Marina. Yes! Of course it is.

But it’s not like you’ve just gone in, idiot-style, and gone ‘oh I’ll just sing any old rubbish over a generic Dr Luke backing track’. (Laughs) No. And also, my stuff gets remixed to oblivion, so I was like, why DON’T I do a dance song? (Laughs) And ALSO, with ‘Fear & Loathing’ , the songwriting structure is so up and down and all over the place that it’s really nice to just write a nice streamlined song for a change.

Well that’s the good thing, it’s just a love song… (Laughs) It might sound like that but really I’m just talking to myself, ha ha ha! No, not really.

Is there anything else you’d like to explain today? No, I don’t think so. Except ‘Fear & Loathing Part Two’ is coming next Monday.

Right, and that’s [UPCOMING TRACK WHOSE TITLE WE HAVE BEEN ASKED TO WITHHOLD FOR THE TIME BEING]? Yes, with the video. It’s going to be the two videos together that are going to be on iTunes, and [UPCOMING TRACK WHOSE TITLE WE HAVE BEEN ASKED TO WITHHOLD FOR THE TIME BEING] you can buy on September 26.

Yeah alright ‘plugging’, do you want to read out the iTunes URL while you’re at it? (Guffaws) Okay. So I don’t think there’s anything else. I don’t know when Part Three will come. A while later. Maybe at the end of the year.

So it’s not leading into an album? How modern. No. But it might be, you never know.

Well this certainly clears things up, and in some ways makes them more complicated. I wonder if this interview will get shelved like the last one?

Hopefully it’ll go up this afternoon. What a bitch though, I was so upset that the last one was shelved. I thought it was my moment to shine. No — in the bin.

Didn’t it go up in the end? No! Unless you put it on, like, shitweb.com.

We should use shitweb.com as a repository for all our rubbish we don’t use. Crap Popjustice interviews and crap Marina demos. OH YES THAT’S AMAZING. Okay, well, that’s it.

Nice to have you back. Thanks!

#interview

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electrasarchive · 5 days ago

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Words: James Mellen

A fresh taking on a fun, intelligent pop record...

For the indie and alternative community, the early 2010s cannot be talked about without discussing one major aspect: Tumblr. A myriad of blog posts, fan accounts, discussion threads, the (pretty much now-defunct) site was the safe space for cult fanbases. Lorde, Lana Del Rey, Halsey, even Arctic Monkeys, were the rulers of the platform at this time. But one artist, although adored by her fans, is often overlooked, arguably due to the fact of how her contemporaries’ records performed commercially (hey ‘Royals’).

Marina Diamandis, formerly known as Marina and the Diamonds, and now known as simply MARINA, is someone who was consistently trending on the platform. Even now her cult fanbase make sure her shows sell out and her albums chart, though at the time much of Marina’s music was well and truly panned. Though her debut, ‘The Family Jewels’, performed well commercially, her sophomore effort ‘Electra Heart’ was met with tepid-at-best reviews, with much of the industry really not understanding it, writing it off as “never clever enough to be more than merely toytown…”

Indeed, as embarrassing as it is to admit, the Clash review of ‘Electra Heart’ is particularly unpleasant – cruel, rude, and actually pretty offensive. Yuck.

But now, at ten years old, ‘Electra Heart’ holds up as an absolutely stellar concept pop record. Yes, some aspects are very, very 2012 (hello ‘Primadonna’), but the forward-thinking nature of the album as well as its part in the Tumblr music chronicles has it truly holding its own today.

Conceptually, ‘Electra Heart’ is centred around titular character, Electra Heart, and touches on the topics of female identity, rebellion, and acceptance, portraying four female archetypes throughout the album: ‘Teen Idle’, ‘Primadonna’, ‘Homewrecker’ and ‘Su-Barbie-A’. From the off, concept albums in pop music are not only brave, but few and far between. In the mid-2000s, pop-punk and emo saw its fair share with the likes of My Chemical Romance’s magnum opus ‘The Black Parade’ and Green Day’s ‘American Idiot’, but commercial, mainstream pop music was hesitant to even attempt such a mammoth task (even the definition of what a ‘concept album’ is will have critics rowing for hours).

Instead of filling up a sophomore record with half-baked, radio friendly, accessible and digestible tracks, Marina wanted to establish a greater prominence within the music industry, as well as telling her stories using an album style unconventional in pop music.

‘Teen Idle’ is perhaps the highlight of the record, overshadowed by the success numbers-wise of ‘Bubblegum Bitch’ and ‘Primadonna’. The track discusses Marina’s anamnesis of secondary school, the harshness of being a teenage girl and the empty realities which follow idealistic dreams. It touches quite explicitly on suicide (‘Feeling super, super, super suicidal!’), with commentary on slut-shaming and body image. Brave concepts for a second album. Thematically, ‘Electra Heart’ was lightyears ahead of anything else being released in its lane around the time, tackling real issues, albeit in a humorous tone, rather than a collection of boardroom written, soulless songs.

Marina’s signature blend of fizzy pop rock with a touch of theatrics is shown with the most clarity on lead single, track opener and streamed-to-death ‘Bubblegum Bitch’. Two-and-a-half minutes of sheer fun. Every melody is sickeningly catchy, and her over-the-top vocal work is rich with emotion and performance. As the opener, it lays the foundations for what ‘Electra Heart’ is at its core – an outstanding pop album. The buzzy synthesisers are plastered across the album and Marina’s knack for storytelling that was first highlighted on ‘The Family Jewels’ is elevated further on the sophomore LP. Her wit and clever lyricism are undeniable, especially when Marina herself stated “I thought it would be funny to rhyme idol with suicidal…” Dark, bleak but you can’t help but agree. The equilibrium of bubblegum pop with inherently dire and borderline nihilistic lyricism is alluring, exciting and unlike a lot of her contemporaries. It’s easier to write sad songs to sad music, but Marina was simply creating songs to dance to, but also to have an existential crisis to. A genius concept, executed beautifully on ‘Electra Heart’.

It really is a testament to how beloved, adored and how well this era of music has held up. While critics were lukewarm to much of it at the time, especially the output of Marina, every artist from this moment in music is still crushing it today. Halsey just headlined Reading and Leeds, Lorde continues to sell out shows nearly instantly, The 1975 are still one of the most polarising bands in the world. TikTok devours sounds from all of these artists, creating stark contrasts between the 2020s fodder that is churned out for the app. And at the heart, is Marina Diamandis. Her forward-thinking music, ten years on, still sounds as fresh and exciting as it did in 2012.

#review #retrospective #marina and the diamonds #electra heart

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electrasarchive · 5 days ago

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By Laura Snapes

Genre: Rock

Label: Atlantic / 679

Reviewed: May 4, 2012

Marina Lambrini Diamandis' second album is a high-gloss record made with Dr. Luke, Stargate, Greg Kurstin, and Liam Howe, and dressed in layers of philosophy, mythology, and blonde wigs.

In Marina Lambrini Diamandis' oft-cited comeback interview with Popjustice last August, she introduced the concept that would lead into her second album: that of Electra Heart, a kind of not-quite-alter-ego/character/affectation/cinematic simulacrum that would feed into the follow-up to her 2010 debut LP as Marina and the Diamonds, The Family Jewels. Representing Greek tragedy, the "loss and failure" side of the American Dream, a daddy complex, and the vacuity apparently lingering inside us all, over six months prior to the eventual release of the LP there was very much a feeling of Marina over-complicating the whole affair: trying to dress up the high-gloss record that she had made with Katy Perry's collaborators (seemingly at the behest of her major label) in layers of philosophy, mythology, artifice, and blonde wigs. (There's a babyish song here called "Hypocrates", misspelled for seemingly no good reason, and with no reference to the philosopher in the song.) It must have stung like billy-o when Lana Del Rey came along and executed precisely what Marina was aiming for, hardly having to open her much-discussed mouth in order to explain herself whilst Marina tied herself in conceptual knots. In short, Electra Heart bears no profound relationship to Greek mythology or philosophical thought beyond exploring situations of basic human pathos (or lack thereof), but its rare affecting moments are heavy with tragedy.

The Family Jewels was disliked by many for its vaudevillian Sparks-like gaucheness, Marina's self-aggrandizement and cock-a-hoop vocal (though there's no doubting the chops of a song like "Hollywood"). But there was a sense of personality to the music as well as Diamandis' deep, hiccupy voice, and a promising sense of audaciousness that's been all but lost here. Working with Dr. Luke, Stargate, Greg Kurstin, and Liam Howe, the songs on Electra Heart fall into three basic categories: the bland, swampy banger (sub-category: "Lies"' Skrillex-lite), a regal, electronic strut falling somewhere between Depeche Mode at their poppiest and the Doctor Who theme tune, and very cloying, nursery rhyme music-box ballads. The campy ding-dong of "The State of Dreaming" is as close as Electra Heart gets to fun, with huge church bells whooshing from side to side in the mix like a pantomime dame testing the trajectory of her ball gown skirts. Relegating great early single "Radioactive" to the bonus tracks on the deluxe version of the LP is nearly as daft as some of the waffle that Marina comes out with here.

Marina really, really wants you to know that she's into pop culture, though the lazy, meaningless strings of references that comprise a good chunk of the songs here aren't any kind of postmodern comment on the Tumblr-ification of society, but just plain bad songwriting. The bombardment of archetypes and clichés is exhausting: "Beauty queen of a silver screen" persuading someone to buy her "a big diamond ring" on "Primadonna"; the titular "Homewrecker" (where excruciatingly bad spoken word verses clash against a pretty triumphant chorus) whose "life is a mess, but I'm still looking pretty in this dress." "Teen Idle" is just horrible, a glitchy ballad that sounds as though it was recorded in a church, where she wishes to be a "virgin pure/ A 21st century whore," "a prom queen fighting for the title/ instead of being 16 and burning up a bible/ feeling super super super suicidal," a chorus of Marinas echoing "super." She wishes for "blood, guts, and angel cake" because "I'm gonna puke it anyway," a weird preoccupation of hers that also crops up in "Homewrecker" ("girls and their cosmic gourmet vomit"), continued from "Girls" on her debut. But as for ending the ego, Marina does seem obsessed with ideas of finality and death-- knowing "where I will belong/ When they blow me out" on the quavering, celestial "Fear and Loathing"-- seemingly finding solace in the reliability of microcosmic, compact celebrity tragedies, perhaps in the face of the parts of this album that ring desperately true.

"You only ever touch me in the dark/ Only if we're drinking can you see my spark," she sings on "Lies". "The only time you open up is when we get undressed," she laments on "Starring Role", which glimmers like clashing porcelain before a stuttering, empowering chorus where she refuses to be a supporting cast member in an alluded-to love triangle. "Doesn't mean that I am weak," she asserts on "Power & Control", repeating, "I am weak, I am weak, I am weak" in an increasingly ephemeral voice. "Every day I feel the same/ Stuck, and I can never change/ Sucked into a black balloon/ Spat into an empty room" goes "Living Dead", a snappy, taut Soft Cell-like number. It feels like shaky ground to say that these vulnerable moments are Electra Heart's finest, catchiest, and hardest-hitting songs, Marina's soaring vocals packing some genuine emotion, picking up on themes of self-loathing that don't need blasé allusions to bulimia in order to indicate emotional emptiness; where the often transcendent states of sex and alcohol collaborate for profoundly dispiriting experiences. Her honesty, at least, is empowering. Whilst there's no getting past some of the duller and more unbearable material on this record, it's a real shame that it's come hamstrung in this unnecessary concept, ready for people to laugh when Marina fails to pull it off. If she'd made a record full of songs as unaffected as these four, Electra Heart could be one of the year's most acclaimed pop albums. Let's hope there's a next time.

#review #sidenote has anyone ever read a pitchfork review that was good?#they are just so committed to hackery

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electrasarchive · 5 days ago

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Alexis Petridis - Thu 26 Apr 2012 15.29 BST

Marina Diamandis has a new alter ego to go with her new musical directon. Unfortunately, it's a rather familiar one

Last August, Marina Diamandis gave a confusing interview to the website Popjustice. She explained her change of direction, from the self-consciously arty singer-songwriterisms of her 2010 debut The Family Jewels – with its similarities to Sparks and Lene Lovich – to the more straightforward pop approach of Electra Heart, an album assembled by a selection of writers and producers for hire who have previously turned out hits for Ronan Keating, Dido, Katy Perry and Britney Spears. The shift was so radical, she said – "the antithesis of everything I've done so far" – that she had created a character to perform the new material, called Electra Heart, whose videos had a "Mulholland Drive/Paris, Texas vibe": cue footage of Diamandis in a blond wig and pastel-shaded 50s clothes, smoking insouciantly and trashing sleazy motel rooms with her bad-boy boyfriend. "She stands for the corrupt side of American ideology, and basically that's the corruption of yourself," she said, adding: "Everything I'm not, I'm becoming."

Those cursed with a suspicious nature might suggest this whole I'm-actually-making-a-mainstream-pop-record-as-a-metatextual-comment-on-both-mainstream-pop-music-and-the-ability-of-ambition-to-corrupt angle sounds not unlike the kind of thing a smart woman might come up with after her record company had examined the sales of her debut album and suggested she either stop making records that sound like Sparks and get in the studio with the bloke who wrote I Kissed a Girl or consider gainful employment elsewhere. But the real problem is that since that interview, another female singer-songwriter has emerged playing a character that portrays the corrupting, tragic side of the American dream with a distinct Mulholland Drive/Paris, Texas vibe – sleazy motels, insouciant smoking, pastel-shaded 50s clothes and bad-boy boyfriend all included. It would appear any similarity to the former Lizzie Grant is purely coincidental – certainly Electra Heart sounds nothing like Born to Die – so it's hard not to feel a bit sorry for Diamandis, who now finds herself promoting her new direction while apparently dressed as Lana del Ray.

The best tracks on Electra Heart are, in fact, not the ones involving the big-name songwriters. These range in quality from decent – the single Primadonna – to perfunctory to flatly appalling: the sub-Womanizer stomp of Homewrecker, which, alas, offers Diamandis an unmissable opportunity to rap in one of the patent funny accents that made The Family Jewels so trying. What they noticeably fail to do is what you presumably employ a big-name songwriter for: deliver the kind of melodic sucker-punch that allows them to transcend their generic musical backing.

In fact, the album's highlights are those Diamandis came up with in collaboration with the producer of The Family Jewels, Liam Howe. On Fear and Loathing and Teen Idle, they strip back most of that album's excesses to let the melodies breathe and focus attention on Diamandis's singing: coolly enunciated and slightly folky, her voice is much more appealing than you might have realised, overshadowed as it was on The Family Jewels by her apparently unquenchable desire to shriek, deploy a horrible vibrato and do animal impersonations. The former is a ballad that seems to address the artistic confusion arising from her debut album's relative failure; it does that in a more straightforward, affecting way than opener Bubblegum Bitch, a heavy-handed attempt at the kind of self-fulfilling I-will-be-huge prophecy that filled The Fame by Lady Gaga. Teen Idle, meanwhile, twists the cynicism of the whole Electra Heart concept into an intriguingly nasty lyric that subverts the message of a million Hollywood teen films by apparently suggesting adolescents would be better off trying to curry favour with the vacuous social elite in their school than expressing their individuality.

These two songs are good enough to make you wonder what might have happened if Diamandis had just got on with making a second album herself, not worrying too much about commerciality or alter-egos or becoming everything she isn't. Perversely, it's good enough to make you hope it does sufficiently well to grant her another shot. There's clearly an interesting pop star somewhere in there: last time she was submerged by her own zaniness, this time she's somewhere beneath some half-hearted songs, a confused concept and someone else's image. Perhaps next time – if there is a next time – she might come good.

#review

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