I run at the sign of a synth? Check your facts mate. :lol:

:lol: It's been a while since I saw a woefully innacurate quote by Doug but that one was worth it. Still, not quite there with his 'Take Care' comments!

 

I have zero interest in this album, Radioactive was so disappointing and Primadonna is the worst thing she's done, which considering how bad some of the debut was, is quite an achievement! Judging from reviews and what people are saying this is a definite miss for me. Pretty sure it will go to number one though, however it will be only be by default on the lowest sales in a hell of a long time!

Listened the whole way through now. Primadonna's still my fave Marina song. It's better than The Family Jewels, IMO. More instant than TFJ was.

I'm loving Bubblegum Bitch at the moment! :wub:

I totally looned over TFJ and this, quite simply, is not a patch on it. Homewrecker is still a chorus in search of a decent song and too many tracks are really anonymous.

 

However Fear and Loathing and Starring Role are absolutely spot on. As is Lies.

 

Primadonna is ok and I do like Bubblegum Bitch.

 

I am so fukkin glad Radioactive is not on it. And to be honest there a few others that could be got rid of too.

First listen over... it's okay but definitely not a patch on The Family Jewels. LOVE the album version of Fear and Loathing though. :wub:

I'm (unsurprisingly) loving this album. It's a pretty solid, pop album with a Marina quirk thrown in. I agree with Aly when he said that she takes the most generic of tracks and manages to stop them from being overly generic by putting her own stamp on the songs. My favourite (non-'Primadonna') moment is 'State of Dreaming'. 'Homewrecker', 'Lies', 'Valley Of the Dolls', 'Hypocrates', 'Fear & Loathing' as well as 'Lonely Hearts Club' are all fantastic. Not quite loving 'Teen Idle' or 'Living Dead' as much at the moment, but they're not "terrible". Very strong second album and I pray this can capitalise on the low sales period and manage to give her a number 1 album, however I can see this flopping for some reason. No matter how well 'Primadonna' is doing. :(

Bubblegum Bitch is the worst opening track to an album that I've heard in a long while. So bad.

Agreed. I can't even wrap my head around the mere fact Bubblegum Bitch was included AT ALL.

After listening a lot: Electra Heart is a masterpiece.

 

I love how it all turns, from Living Dead to a critic of the first part of the LP (from Bubblegum Bitch until Power & Control). The Archetypes would totally fit as an interlude between the two parts of the album. If I had to choose the worst track it would be maybe Hypocrates.

 

I hope it does well in the charts. Marina had the best innovative idea to be a sell-out and it was creating her alterego Electra Heart, that makes her even more awesome than she actually was :kink:.

 

Next single is Power And Control apparently... absolutely crazy when Lies is just asking to be playlisted on Radio 1.

'2nd' single (of course it's actually 3rd but everyone skips Radioactive even though it's by far the best thing about this era) is Power And Control...

 

Not a choice I expected, good song but I'm not sure how to feel with it being a single. It's not as if anything will be massive, but Lies would've been the best choice.

it's one of my favourites, but I wouldn't go with it as a single choice. I agree that 'lies' would be the best choice for next single considering it's the song that has the best reviews so far.

Terrible choice. Well it's not a terrible song, but it definitely won't be a hit. 'Lies', 'State of Dreaming' or 'Homewrecker' would be first choices, imo. I'd love a 'Fear & Loathing' release but it'd do worse than 'Power & Control' will do. Although I think it could actually keep the album selling...

http://www.dingsme.info/avatar10.jpgSo excited for the new album!

Edited May 3, 201213 yr by michael2001

YES! Power & Control is the best song on the album.

Last June, Vanity Fair published a report from a party held in the Hamptons by Disney star Ashley Tisdale. Ke$ha was there, apparently with "a YSL carryall on one arm and postmodernist Fredric Jameson on the other." Asked about her guest, she was quoted as saying, "F is amazing. I'll be, like, complaining about my music video director, and he'll just put everything in perspective by being like, 'The end of the bourgeois ego, or monad, no doubt brings with it the end of the psychopathologies of that ego-- what I have been calling the waning of affect. But it means the end of much more-- the end, for example, of style, in the sense of the unique and the personal, the end of the distinctive individual brush stroke (as symbolized by the emergent primacy of mechanical reproduction),' or something, and he's right." The comment was reported with a certain degree of sniffiness, all "like"s intact: While Ke$ha's apparent ability to recall the kind of quote that it takes most people five minutes to understand is impressive, it does seem incongruous from a woman who routinely asks her live audience, "Is there enough glitter on my titties?" (The answer is never "yes.")

It does make you ask questions about how snobby we can be about these pop and scholarly worlds colliding, associating philosophical nous with supposedly more highbrow musicians, bedroom producers turning out minimal electro whilst studying for their PhD. In Marina Lambrini Diamandis' oft-cited comeback interview with Popjustice last August, she introduced the concept that would lead into her second album: that of Electra Heart, a kind of not-quite-alter-ego/character/affectation/cinematic simulacrum that would feed into the follow-up to her 2010 debut LP as Marina and the Diamonds, The Family Jewels. Representing Greek tragedy, the "loss and failure" side of the American Dream, a daddy complex, and the vacuity apparently lingering inside us all, over six months prior to the eventual release of the LP there was very much a feeling of Marina over-complicating the whole affair: trying to dress up the high-gloss record that she had made with Katy Perry's collaborators (seemingly at the behest of her major label) in layers of philosophy, mythology, artifice, and blonde wigs. (There's a babyish song here called "Hypocrates", misspelled for seemingly no good reason, and with no reference to the philosopher in the song.) It must have stung like billy-o when Lana Del Rey came along and executed precisely what Marina was aiming for, hardly having to open her much-discussed mouth in order to explain herself whilst Marina tied herself in conceptual knots. In short, Electra Heart bears no profound relationship to Greek mythology or philosophical thought beyond exploring situations of basic human pathos (or lack thereof), but its rare affecting moments are heavy with tragedy.

Fredric Jameson's second comment, as recited by Ke$ha, is one that very much applies to Electra Heart. The Family Jewels was disliked by many for its vaudevillian Sparks-like gaucheness, Marina's self-aggrandizement and cock-a-hoop vocal (though there's no doubting the chops of a song like "Hollywood"). But there was a sense of personality to the music as well as Diamandis' deep, hiccupy voice, and a promising sense of audaciousness that's been all but lost here. Working with Dr. Luke, Stargate, Greg Kurstin, and Liam Howe, the songs on Electra Heart fall into three basic categories: the bland, swampy banger (sub-category: "Lies"' Skrillex-lite), a regal, electronic strut falling somewhere between Depeche Mode at their poppiest and the Doctor Who theme tune, and very cloying, nursery rhyme music-box ballads. The campy ding-dong of "The State of Dreaming" is as close as Electra Heart gets to fun, with huge church bells whooshing from side to side in the mix like a pantomime dame testing the trajectory of her ball gown skirts. Relegating great early single "Radioactive" to the bonus tracks on the deluxe version of the LP is nearly as daft as some of the waffle that Marina comes out with here.

Where she proves Fredric Jameson wrong is that there's seemingly no end to "the psychopathologies of the ego" in this instance. Marina really, really wants you to know that she's into pop culture, though the lazy, meaningless strings of references that comprise a good chunk of the songs here aren't any kind of postmodern comment on the Tumblr-ification of society, but just plain bad songwriting. The bombardment of archetypes and clichés is exhausting: "Beauty queen of a silver screen" persuading someone to buy her "a big diamond ring" on "Primadonna"; the titular "Homewrecker" (where excruciatingly bad spoken word verses clash against a pretty triumphant chorus) whose "life is a mess, but I'm still looking pretty in this dress." "Teen Idle" is just horrible, a glitchy ballad that sounds as though it was recorded in a church, where she wishes to be a "virgin pure/ A 21st century whore," "a prom queen fighting for the title/ instead of being 16 and burning up a bible/ feeling super super super suicidal," a chorus of Marinas echoing "super." She wishes for "blood, guts, and angel cake" because "I'm gonna puke it anyway," a weird preoccupation of hers that also crops up in "Homewrecker" ("girls and their cosmic gourmet vomit"), continued from "Girls" on her debut. But as for ending the ego, Marina does seem obsessed with ideas of finality and death-- knowing "where I will belong/ When they blow me out" on the quavering, celestial "Fear and Loathing"-- seemingly finding solace in the reliability of microcosmic, compact celebrity tragedies, perhaps in the face of the parts of this album that ring desperately true.

"You only ever touch me in the dark/ Only if we're drinking can you see my spark," Diamandis sings on "Lies". "The only time you open up is when we get undressed," she laments on "Starring Role", which glimmers like clashing porcelain before a stuttering, empowering chorus where she refuses to be a supporting cast member in an alluded-to love triangle. "Doesn't mean that I am weak," she asserts on "Power & Control", repeating, "I am weak, I am weak, I am weak" in an increasingly ephemeral voice. "Every day I feel the same/ Stuck, and I can never change/ Sucked into a black balloon/ Spat into an empty room" goes "Living Dead", a snappy, taut Soft Cell-like number. It feels like shaky ground to say that these vulnerable moments are Electra Heart's finest, catchiest, and hardest-hitting songs, Marina's soaring vocals packing some genuine emotion, picking up on themes of self-loathing that don't need blasé allusions to bulimia in order to indicate emotional emptiness; where the often transcendent states of sex and alcohol collaborate for profoundly dispiriting experiences. Her honesty, at least, is empowering. Whilst there's no getting past some of the duller and more unbearable material on this record, it's a real shame that it's come hamstrung in this unnecessary concept, ready for people to laugh when Marina fails to pull it off. If she'd made a record full of songs as unaffected as these four, Electra Heart could be one of the year's most acclaimed pop albums. Let's hope there's a next time.

 

5.9

 

Pitchfork haven't really been on good form recently but this is pretty accurate i think (if a LITTLE exaggerated maybe)

Adore this album, will deffo purchase when I have some spare cash!

Album FINALLY arrived. Listening through for the first time now, Lies really is :heart:

Surprisingly loving the album! Great work as a whole, brilliant pop tunes.. Bubblegum Bitch is PERFECT and Lies and Homewrecker stand out as well. Primadonna sounds a bit lost in the album and very glad they didn't include Radioactive in the end.

I got the album yesterday, Bubblegum Bitch is kinda amazing, such a catchy pop song, works perfectly as an opening track. Lies, Teen Idle and Hypocrates also sound good from the first few listens.

 

Power & Control is a perfectly stellar choice for the next single, there are worse choices. It's all very tentative, I haven't got used to it yet, but the album is looking very promising right now.

Relegating great early single "Radioactive" to the bonus tracks on the deluxe version of the LP is nearly as daft as some of the waffle that Marina comes out with here.

 

Pitchfork talks sense for once.