(679 Recordings/Warner)

Marina Marina Marina!

You can’t blame Marina Diamandis, AKA Marina & The Diamonds, for feeling the weight of expectation on her shoulders: she’s signed to 679 Recordings, the home of Little Boots and Annie, and has the requisite amount of NME-backed hype that saw Florence & The Machine shoot to the top of the charts in the UK. It’s a topic she deals with in Are You Satisfied?, the opener to her début, The Family Jewels: “High achiever, don’t you see? / Baby nothing comes for free / They say I’m a control freak / Driven by a greed to succeed.” Well, if you say so, Marina. It might be an exaggeration to say that the whole album is dedicated to such pop-star-in-waiting posturing – after all, Mowgli’s Road, possibly the disc’s catchiest tune, is a harpsichord-driven glam stomper about being chased by cutlery – but it’s hard not to be slapped in the face by Diamandis’s incredibly insecure vanity. This desperation for success (and its trappings) leads her to self-consciously ‘zany’ production values and vocal histrionics taken straight from the Kate Bush songbook, except where Bush actually meant her weirdness and had the courage to embody it in a much more conservative pop music culture, it’s clear that Diamandis is just playing dress-ups. There is some good pop to be found on The Family Jewels if you’re able to get past the over-inflated persona of Diamandis herself, but, given how difficult she makes this task, I won’t blame you if you don’t succeed.

**½

CHAD PARKHILL

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