Marina and the diamonds
First heard her when she did a very simple version of "I am not a robot" on the Culture show. Just her and a keyboardist, I believe it was. A very minimalist sort of showcase for her and her voice, almost pretentiously so, it seemed to me at the time. I haven't found the exact performance online, but I suppose it was quite similar to this one, only with more make-up and minus the maraccas.
Maybe it was the make-up that put me off, or perhaps her stary eyes or bizarre gesticulations... in any case I was deeply unconvinced. Of course because the whole thing was so unusual and stuck in my mind, I went back to it some time later, and after several more listens, became slightly obsessed. It's definitely the voice, more specifically the way she switches from the gritty deep end to absolutely entrancingly beautiful high notes that sound quintessentially classical - like a soprano choirgirl/boy.
In the end I caved in and bought the album, but I still can't claim to be familiar with all of it. "Hollywood" is a song that makes her seem not so original after all, but then there's songs like Mowgli's Road, when she's back to her idiosyncratic, slightly disturbing form, in terms of everything - the video, voice and lyrics. And that character seems to run through most of everything else she's been putting out. She's not quite like Marmite, because I manage to love and sort of hate it at once, rather than veering towards one extreme or the other, and she's not quite like a "disturbing yet can't look away" car crash scenario either. If I could think of a metaphore for something that is at once exquisitely and classically beautiful and yet strangely surprising in an alarming sort of way, then I'd have nailed it.
Bat For Lashes
Bat for Lashes, like Marina and the Diamonds, and Florence and the Machine, is another one of those ambiguous "is it a band or is it just her?" specimens. And in all 3 cases, it's the latter. So Bat for Lashes aka Natasha Khan has much in common with Marina, they both have interesting heritage, make bizarre videos, and have voices that don't come around too often. I first heard Natasha singing "Use somebody" (which incidentally was the first time I heard that song sung by anyone). Although I have a great deal of time for Marina, I think she has a little way to go compared with Natasha. Marina's output is somewhat inconsistent in that you get something mind-altering like "I'm Not a Robot" and then you get blandness.com in the shape of "Hollywood". Much more hit and miss than Natasha, who's records - if the one I have is anything to go by, form coherent, intelligible wholes in which each element plays an essential constitutive part. What I love about the "Two Suns" album is that there is something that runs all the way through it, a thread, a theme - that seems also to have been present in her earlier stuff. Much of it appears to be in the realm of dreams, the surreal, and fairytales. But it is not just airy notions of clouds and castles in the sky, there are also nightmares. And songs like "Siren Song" especially testify to the presence of a threatening alter-ego, a sinister dark side and the constant risk of falling into the abyss.
I'm not gonna lie, a lot of the songs I haven't found to be nearly so accessible and it's still something I'm working on. But I must say, in these
days of autotune it's refreshing to hear voices which do not sound completely generic, and I so often end up adoring things that on a first listen absolutely appall me. It is useful to remember I suppose, that we are as much conditioned to appreciate a certain type of sound as we are to appreciate a certain kind of beauty and it's always worth trying to step out of that, to the extent that it's possible.
The XX
A band who've been on the circuit for a while, but I never claimed to be avant-garde. No such mixed reactions as with the two above, heard it on the radio and fell instantly under the mesmerising spell of the haunting, down-beat "Crystallised". Getting a bit more familiar with the band was initially dissapointing, as again - the rest of the stuff is less easily accessible as the songs which are picked up for radio-play... But the voice of the male singer, Olli, is one I could happily listen to all day even if he were singing the phonebook. Romy I have more difficulty with, she has a manner of speaking that comes across when she sings in a way that bothers me, but I'm learning to get past it, or at least learning to force myself to.
This is a band that, the more I learn about them, the more I appreciate them. Having watched the video for Crystallised, which is absolutely perfect, most of what I read makes perfect sense. The idea of childhood friends Romy and Olli exchanging lyrics over skype because it's "too personal" to bear doing it in person, is at once incredibly poignant and also something so typical of the internet age, in which everything becomes remote, and which of course has completely revolutionised the whole process of making music, and the music itself. The New Yorker reviewer who said that "These are songs to be sung inches from someone’s ear, preferably with the lights off" was spot on. They absolutely are. But they are also lyrics that seem to have been dragged out of their creators, the reluctant poets who cannot even look at each other when they are singing them, because it's just too close to the bone (the video for Crystallised for instance, has them all facing forwards looking rather dazed, in the shadows, while pictures of the sky are projected across their faces.
There's something anonymous and almost robotic about the delivery, yet when you're listening to it, it just drips with sentimentality and feeling. Because the arangements are so stripped-down however, there is nowhere to hide the lyrics, but cleverly they found a way of circumventing that problem by singing over each other, at the same time, something they explain here: There's something about that which has a wonderful stiff-upper lip quality that might just be unique to the Brits, a kind of typical English repressedness, whereby some things are just too emotionally-laden to say, at least with the lights on.
