The fourth album by Marina Diamandis, and her first without the mantle of “Marina and the Diamonds,” arrives after four years spent battling depression and self-doubt. Her first priority in composing Love + Fear seems to have been returning to a place where music could be enjoyable, and generative, and healing; in a word, safe. Listening to the record is like slipping into a meditation exercise, with Marina as soft, soothing sloganeer: Close your eyes, and imagine you’re on a beach; just breathe, and let your worries disappear.
Marina’s devoted following, and her many LGBTQ listeners in particular, rely on her for complex, indrawn alternatives to hollow empowerment anthems. But the qualities that so endeared her to fans—her vulnerability, her appetite for risk, her unflinching handling of misogyny and mental illness—are absent here. “We don’t have the time to be introspective when there are more important things happening,” Marina recently told Fader. Without introspection, the lyrics of Love + Fear feel fully incidental to the songs swirling around them.
Safety, as an artistic priority, can shield creativity from anxiety. It can also dull an artist’s edges. Nowhere is this more evident than in Marina’s newfound dependence on “melodic math,” the Max Martin-pioneered songwriting technique that involves slotting syllables into an instrumental track, even if the resulting lyric is semi-incoherent. This can be a useful compositional tool; it can also be the reason Ariana Grande sings, “Now that I’ve become who I really are.” Though melodic math is wildly incompatible with Marina’s verbose, literary sensibility, Love + Fear is redolent of the stuff. Lyrics are occasionally nonsensical (“Stuck in fast forward, always on the rewind”) or simply sloppy (“My love is a planet revolving your heart”). The chorus of “Emotional Machine” consists of facile rhyming: “I’m a machine/An emotional bein’/Since I was a teen/Cut my feelings off clean.” When Marina covered similar territory on 2010’s “I Am Not a Robot,” she wrote: “Better to be hated/Than loved, loved, loved for what you’re not/You’re vulnerable, so vulnerable/You are not a robot.” This is a staggering slide, from affecting poetry to cold calculation. How to account for it?
It’s tempting to blame new co-writers like OzGo, a producer who’s worked extensively with Martin, for pushing Marina toward a more easily digestible pop product. But 2012’s Electra Heart also featured a battery of powerhouse collaborators, and still Marina’s distinct observations shone through. Greg Kurstin, who produced much of Electra Heart, may work with mega-stars like Adele and Ellie Goulding, but it’s hard to imagine either of them singing, “Wish I’d been a prom queen fighting for the title/Instead of being 16 and burning up a Bible/Feeling super, super, super suicidal.” Love + Fear’s gratuitous use of melodic math seems deliberate and freely chosen.
When Marina’s vocal delivery allows a glimmer of personality to shine through the genericism, the results are lovely. “Baby,” a collaboration with Clean Bandit and Luis Fonsi, stands head and shoulders above every other track, even though it already appeared on Clean Bandit’s own album last fall. On “No More Suckers,” Marina’s bratty, schoolyard-taunt delivery recalls Cher Lloyd’s excellent 2011 single “Want U Back,” elevating standard break-up fare into something witty and winking. “Too Afraid” is an aching counterpoint to anodyne lead singles “Handmade Heaven” and “Orange Trees.” When Marina sings, “I don’t know what to do/I hate this city, but I stay ’cause of you,” she grounds the earlier songs’ wide-eyed daydreaming in deeper meaning.
Elsewhere, though, Marina finds herself unable—or maybe afraid—to offer any originality. “True” is little more than a string of bland body-positivity slogans, too stale for a Dove commercial a decade ago. “Superstar” hints at substance by pairing foreboding minor-key synths with the opening lyric, “Before I met you, I pushed them all away,” then devolves into a standard, sugary love song. On “To Be Human,” Marina stretches the bridge of U2’s “Beautiful Day” to the length of a full song, and fills the space with a bizarre reference to Vladimir Lenin’s embalmed corpse. Though Marina has called “To Be Human” the album’s “most political song,” she resists making any definitive statements. When she sings, “There were riots in America/Just when things were getting better,” she doesn’t deign to place the lyric in context. Which riots? What was getting better, and for whom? By contrast, “Savages,” a standout from 2015’s Froot, offered a blazing indictment of human aggression that simultaneously demonstrated Marina’s strength as a songwriter: “I’m not afraid of God/I am afraid of man.”
In the past, whether Marina was working in a diaristic mode or a fictive one, she never caved to normality. That Marina—the lyricist who wasn’t afraid to detail the taste of toothpaste on a lover’s tongue, the vocalist who wasn’t afraid to punctuate a sentence with a feral shriek—has gone missing. The temptation of safe is undeniable, but mononyms are earned by embracing risk.
