Marina & The Diamonds - Electra Heart (CD)

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 one-time 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”. 

TRACKLISTING:

1 Bubblegum Bitch, 2 Primadonna, 3 Lies, 4 Homewrecker, 5 Starring Role, 6 The State Of Dreaming,  7 Power & Control, 8 Living Dead, 9 Teen Idle, 10 Valley Of The Dolls, 11 Hypocrates, 12 Fear And Loathing,

Bonus Tracks on Deluxe Edition only: 13 Radioactive, 14 Sex Yeah, 15 Lonely Hearts Club, 16 Buy The Stars,

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