It's neither Amanda Warner's fault nor entirely ignorable that she's surrounded by so many peers. Warner, who's performed for years with producer Peter Wade under the moniker MNDR, makes buzzy synthpop amid a deafening buzz of likeminded bands, and from any point in her career, it's a short step to two or three rough analogues or influences. After a couple of years jobbing behind the scenes for the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and others, Warner's break came in 2010 when she lent a careening hook and Francophone snappiness to "Bang Bang Bang" by Mark Ronson, an act arguably better known for his antecedents (the vague, remembered 1960s), protégées, and followers than his actual music. This proves apt. The EP that caught Ronson's notice, E.P.E., strutted and shouted and revived all the 80s synthpop fit to get print. It commanded both attention and an inevitable clutter of comparisons: La Roux, Santigold, Goldfrapp.
The namedrops were predictable, but not entirely unwarranted. Warner's said she turned down various unnamed honchos with Katy Perry designs, though she didn't mind tossing tracks about with Patrik Berger, who co-wrote Robyn's "Dancing on My Own", and in the past few years she's built up a small battalion of collaborators eager to emulate that track. E.P.E. and its follow-ups are primarily Warner and Wade's work, but it's hard not to hear their influences. "I go my own way…/ This is my anthem," Warner sang on lead single "I Go Away" over meticulously rippling percussion and sumptuous synths; her way, by all indications, was stylish and fully formed, but perhaps a little too timely.
Two years later, Warner's debut LP arrives in much the same manner. She bursts off the cover of Feed Me Diamonds amid neon and chrome shrapnel; it's arresting, but it's pastiche. The music inside is much the same: 12 mostly solid electro-pop tracks that are immediate, immaculate, and suited equally to outlets populist-- "U.B.C.L." appeared in Jersey Shore in a prior rewrite-- and outré. The album's custom-built, in other words, to the synthpop template of the past few years. Some tracks veer house, others electroclash, others toward an 80s slow dance. Strewn through the mix are percussion stutters and pinball noises, and dubstep touches you could actually call tasteful. "Burning Hearts" begins with hoover synths, guitar bluster, and slivered vocal samples, like the Sleigh Bells/Purity Ring hybrid that legions undoubtedly asked for; it's even got spider imagery that could have crawled off the latter's debut. "Waiting" rides either a "Tainted Love" groove or whatever's left of it after three decades of further tainting. Albums like these have a few things in common. They're generally likeable. They almost always sound fantastic. At their worst, they substitute sheen for swagger and noise for punch; at their best, they have all four.
At her best, MNDR does. Single "#1 in Heaven", inspired by kidnapped then corrupted robber-heiress Patty Hearst, gleams like a bumper sticker; it turns her post-arrest taunts into a killer hook ("Tell them I'm smiling/ Send my greetings") and her bank stickup into instructions for the dance floor ("put your hands above your head…."). Warner's similarly occupied on loopy club anthem "U.B.C.L.", a rework of EPE's leadoff track, skewed only as much as its title. It's half as clever as it thinks it is, but probably twice as functional. "Sparrow Voices" is bracing, Warner and a sequencer trying to outfeint one another, though it's probably advisable to ignore anything it's trying to say about the cracks in China's economy.
That's the sort of topicality MNDR ascribes to almost every track. She's called the album an attempt to "[challenge] money, wealth, power and the class system," an admirable goal for a different occasion. It's not that dance-pop can't be subverted, but Hearst repurposed as a dancing queen is roughly par here. "Fall in Love With the Enemy" doesn't get much deeper than saying it isn't a choice. "Blue Jean Youth" is a list of nostalgia checkpoints that aims for iconic but lands somewhere around clip art. These are missteps, though, and few. "Faster Horses", named for an apocryphal Henry Ford quote ("if I'd asked my customers what they wanted, they'd have said faster horses") is noisy and addled-- the vague vocal patois on "the front ro-ow... you don't kno-ow” has too many similarities to mention-- but as a commentary on the genre's demand for ever-catchier material, it works.
Feed Me Diamonds is best, though, when it gets emotionally heady. At first "Stay" sounds too chilly, too insistent on delivering pat soundbites like "I'm not going to fade away," but the way the chorus trails off and the catch in Warner's voice when she sings "aching" betrays the act. The title track, meanwhile, is all catches. It's got its footnotes-- the reference this time is a quote by performance artist Marina Abramović about how her father was killed after being fed fine-pureed diamonds-- but you don't need to consult them to hear the masochism in Warner's voice as she meanders from the first crafted couplet ("lie with me, lie to me") on through reduction and dismantlement metaphors. MNDR always had style; here, at least, the substance has caught up.
