Marina And The Diamonds – The Family Jewels: Why The Rushed Reviews Are Wrong
Hype. Terrible thing, really. In fact, it’s almost become a derogatory term. The thing is, hype can make you so appealing to professional journos flailing around in an overcrowded sea of “music critics” (let’s face it, having the intellectual athleticism to make a few clicks on blogger.com does not make you Pete flipping Paphides) that they are driven to fling out record reviews earlier and earlier, attempting to beat the keyboard wielding masses. Unfortunately, though, this culture of desperation breeds only a tendency to fling out shittier and shittier malformed opinions of records that they, often, have yet to get their heads around. So be this the case with Marina and the Diamonds, who, as it is mercilessly intoned in review upon review, is from Abergavenny, not that 99% of the population actually know where that is, nor that it reveals the mysteries of her debut album, “The Family Jewels”. They must get paid by the word, these days. Perhaps obscure Welsh villages come with bonus points.
Some of these early reviews came with a general air of derision and disappointment, yet failed to properly articulate where the problems lay. This led to a blanket complaint of Marina’s apparent “grating voice” (The Times, BBC, The Guardian) , an excuse that seems to serve as little more than a vague attempt to explain why these critics and their sensitive (and now grated) ears weren’t happy. Though it is, of course, a matter of taste, the suggestion that her vocal delivery is offensive is absolutely ludicrous; original, different, slightly appealingly masculine, yes, but “grating”? Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that banality is the unchallenged norm in popular music, when a sly trace of originality is treated like a venereal disease by professional critics.
The Times’ Mark Edwards goes on to suggest that Marina’s song writing lacks innovation, whilst X Factor puppets and auto-tuned R&B ironically climbs the charts in the background, and singles out “Are You Satisfied” as a “potential hit”. If nothing else, this alone constitutes enough evidence to convict the reviewer of a little too much haste; “Are You Satisfied” is unarguably streets behind “Oh No”, “Girls” or “Shampain” in terms of commercial appeal.
The BBC doesn’t start off promisingly by opening with berating Marina for being “not weird”, and then labelling her “insane” in the following paragraph. After the customary mentions of this mysterious “grating voice” and the token reference to Abergavenny, Marina is then accused of having a “massive ego”, thanks to the first line of “Oh No”; “Don’t do love, don’t do friends / I’m only after success”. The BBC clearly didn’t notice that this line was delivered uncharacteristically po-faced, yet the following line of “Don’t want money, don’t want cars / want it fast, want it hard” emerges from an explosion of those “grating”, ballsy Marina vocals. Now, call me presumptuous, but my GCSE in English Literature suggests to me that it is the second of the two couplets that is Marina talking… Of course I am not an internet-naive caveman and understand that a BBC journalist is going to get the album even before it leaks online, but the fact that the review was delivered on 12th February (after editing) can only indicate that the journalist was strangely interested in getting one up on those shit munching bloggers waiting for a leak.
The Independent’s review, meanwhile, put to bed these infantile suggestions of a “grating voice” and instead approached the record from a very different perspective. Unfortunately, this perspective was to talk about The Dresden Dolls for as long as legally possible, then reluctantly making some disinterested comments about “The Family Jewels”, before, presumably, finishing the irksome work of reviewing new music and returning to ploughing through The Dresden Dolls’ back catalogue. When not talking about other bands, though, the review is once again pioneering in the nature of its criticism, choosing to approach the album by ignoring irrelevant musical content and, instead, evaluating the obscurity of each song title. Our reviewer observes that a song about feeling numb is called “Numb”, and that another about being rootless is called “Rootless”, quite shockingly, before concluding with the opinion that a song about being guilty is called “Guilty” and, therefore, this album can only be shallow, unintelligent drivel. If we don’t take these “criticisms” at face value, we can assume that he seems to think that a lack of subtlety is the album’s problem. Yet he complete fails to either listen to or understand the irony of the song “Hollywood”, and instead complains about the obviousness Marina “wearing stars and stripes” in the song’s video… Apparently, it is not Marina who lacks the intellectual depth, but this particular reviewer who is in need of picking up on some of the record’s subtleties. It’s going to take a fucking lot of tedious su doku to exercise that grey matter, Simon Price.
Ultimately, “The Family Jewels” has been somewhat shunned by a select section of the professional press who seem diametrically opposed to pop music of any nature, only willing to praise a succession of bookish acts with the intellectual stamina of Radiohead or Battles. Fortunately, there is a large contingent of the press who are not embroiled in a restless search for the musical equivalent of a PhD dissertation on the thermodynamics of a lump of metal (ie, fucking boredom), and instead can do nothing but commend Marina for bringing a conscience back to a pop music landscape that was quickly becoming a succession of vacuous noises devoid of any sincerity or intelligence. Thankfully, these reviews appreciating the album for its importance to pop music far outweigh this limp dicked micro-cosm of reviews who seem to have convinced themselves that Marina has vocal chords capable of damaging ears, and that you’d be better off listening to The Dresden Dolls. I stated quite unpoetically back in January that “we need a pop star like Marina”, and whilst Dickens might have delivered it in a more, well, Dickensian manner, and Wilde would have found it easy to spin this truth out into a cunning epithet, sometimes subtlety and spin are far less important than the hard-hitting, straight-talking facts.
PS: You can, and should, buy the album here. Illegal downloading is so not fashionable anymore, but you can stream a few tracks above.
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February 24th, 2010 at 3:43 am
Cheers on a well articulated post… you make some very valid points, and I would have to agree with you on ridiculousness of all of the panning of ‘The Family Jewels’. Marina is exactly what pop should be: fun, exciting, intriguing and, oh yeah, talent-driven. Too often ignored!
February 24th, 2010 at 7:48 am
Absolutely spot on. Now we just have to see whether Ellie Goulding can match this… If she can, it will be a great couple of weeks for pop music.
February 24th, 2010 at 3:44 pm
who gives a fuck what the Times/Independent etc have to say about contempory music? Just a load of bitter old farts who write for Q.
February 24th, 2010 at 5:57 pm
You shouldn’t be surprised that I completely agree with you Jose, but I also really enjoyed your blog on sordid biblical verse
That’s an interesting point Robert… I am looking forward to “Lights”, and it’s inevitably going to be endlessly compared to Marina, but I’m not sure if that’s really going to help… the two need to be appreciated alone.
Well mike, I appreciate your sentiments, and I most certainly don’t, but the point is that they exert a lot of influence and have a large readership, “old farts” or not, who make up a decent portion of the record buying public.
February 25th, 2010 at 12:32 am
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February 25th, 2010 at 7:06 am
Well said Phil…. “we need a pop star like Marina” Amen
Did you catch this review? My Flabber was gasted.
http://lizzyville.blogs.com/index/2010/02/marina-and-the-diamonds-the-family-jewels.html
February 25th, 2010 at 5:03 pm
Indeed, am a little shocked… There seems to be a general pretension held against all pop music – it is just found guilty of various crimes solely by association with all the waste that make up the charts.
I do have a question for you though which I thought was quite interesting, if completely irrelevant… Do you think the album would have sounded any different if released by Neon Gold?
February 25th, 2010 at 9:52 pm
Difficult to say. It seems the people who are disappointed where maybe expecting a Siouxsie Sioux album. The fact is its of its time and there was always going to be an electro pop element as thats a la mode at present. had Punk been dominating the charts Im sure it would have had that procuction edge.
February 25th, 2010 at 10:02 am
Brava, I concur with every word.
First time I’ve been to this site (through hypem) and I’l be coming back for seconds, thirds….
Though the remix’s ‘grate’ me..
February 25th, 2010 at 5:05 pm
Cheers Sean, I do actually like this remix, but, since you mention it, it was only a few days ago that we had a little rant about the awful remixes that are clogging the arteries of hypem.com: http://notmanyexperts.com/2010/02/ellie-goulding-x-velo-the-blog-remix-economy-is-munching-itself-to-death.html
February 25th, 2010 at 5:06 pm
Oh, and the bottom of this post: http://notmanyexperts.com/2010/02/white-hinterland-icarus.html
Seems I have been blowing steam off about remixes more than even I would expect…
March 1st, 2010 at 11:17 pm
Love it – a review of the reviews to form a review. (Is that ironic laziness ? Only joking !) You’ve made loads of good passionate points here (again). The Marina album certainly divided the ‘critics’ and I have no issue with the ones who don’t like it – the world would be a boring place if everyone liked the same thing. However when a journalist is paid to write something, you would hope at least that they used a degree of intelligence in their arguments and some of the reviews you quoted didn’t it would appear.
I think my favourite reviews that I read are ones that entertain, inform on facts, give opinions with some justification and context, and try to bring at least half a degree of originality to the review.
I think I posted this on my blog as well, but I couldn’t care for the Pitchfork / PhD dissertation / Thesaurus style of writing. I prefer communication that is clear.
Thanks for listing my review as one of the good guys. I stand by everything I wrote on my review now.
March 17th, 2010 at 10:21 am
Her simple lyrics seem to confuse so many into thinking that the songs themselves are shallow and cheap. Numb is titled so because it fits the song. She is a straight forward pop star who can do what ever she likes.
April 2nd, 2010 at 7:57 pm
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April 12th, 2010 at 12:19 am
I don’t usually read that many reviews–particularly of the same album!–but I have followed the reviews for this to some extent, and I too have been pretty unimpressed with them. Sometimes the reviewer doesn’t appear to have even listened to the album once; for instance, I have read at least one complaint that “all” the songs are upbeat, fast tempo numbers (as though “I Am Not A Robot,” “Numb,” “Rootless” don’t exist). It may be that the album is not a hit with critics “only willing to praise a succession of bookish acts with the intellectual stamina of Radiohead or Battles,” but it seems that a lot of chart pop/Top 40 oriented critics have been down on it as well. It is, perhaps, too avant-pop for them. I’m neither a big fan of recent mainstream pop, nor much of an indie fan at all, and I love it.
April 23rd, 2010 at 1:23 pm
Really great entry. I was prepared to be judgmental and defensive since there is something effervescently refreshing to Marina in my opinion, but you hit it in the nose.
I think I have a new blog to follow.
May 27th, 2010 at 1:24 am
If only more people could read this.