Marina Allen wields intimacy like a weapon. The Los Angeles-based singer-songwriter's clear, quietly powerful voice is sometimes reminiscent of Carole King, sometimes Julia Holter, sometimes Maggie Rogers. Her lush Laurel Canyon-referenced output fits right in with the '70s folk-rock revival that's been going on in Los Angeles for most of the last decade, epitomized by artists like Weyes Blood, Hand Habits and Sam Burton. But for all the softness she telegraphs in her music, Allen's third album Eight-pointed star it's sharp and hard to pin down, its familiar surroundings camouflaging lyrics that can be vivid and imaginative.
What other album uses the image of eating bones as a basic metaphor on two separate tracks? “I eat the meat/I eat the bones,” on the clockwork country-rock song “Swinging Doors,” becomes a rousing scream of confidence. In the airy, rambling “Red Cloud,” consumption becomes a way into Allen's personal history. she makes “a stew of rainwater and frozen meat, thick with pine needles, warm beer, and baby teeth” and wakes up “in a daze in Red Cloud,” the Nebraska town her family hails from. The song's lazy haze hides the intensity with which Allen tries to condense hundreds of years of history into a pop song, placing herself at its center: “I'm tainted, I'm taught, to be hard, to be raw, to be ruined , to be destroyed/Like the women whose backs hurt me and whose skin blisters, they make me coffee and burnt bread.' Beneath Allen's laid-back compositions are lyrics that seem to be scratching and poking at their seams in search of meaning.
Allen's lyrics always made sense—even the most accessible songs on her underrated 2022 album The central ones, like the piano-bar tune 'Or Else', were written in long, elegant sentences that contrasted with the simple production. But the songs Eight-pointed star they're more oblique and mysterious: They're often set in half-imagined, half-remembered places, like the eponymous town in “Red Cloud” or the expanses of farmland that Allen conjures up in the fairy tale “Bad Eye Opal.” Much of the album is ostensibly about Allen finding a sense of confidence—in art, in relationships, or in herself—and that confidence, true to the adage that the more you learn, the less you know, results in songs that firmly cement themselves. gray areas of life.
Even so, Allen stumbles upon complex truths that she delivers with steely determination. Opener “I'm the Same,” a piece of serene, spacious Americana, at first seems so calm it's unrecognizable as a breakup song. But that calm is consistent with Allen's reprimands to a partner, which are honest and clear: “Feeling wronged ain't the same as proof,” he sings, delivering the line with the flippancy of someone who knows it's in. the right. It's a rare moment of certainty, and from the record's final song, “Between Seasons,” all she's sure of is that change can be great. She feels like a mirror of “I'm the Same”: Instead of chastising a partner for not seeing her fully, she enjoys the feeling of growth. But the bottom line, once again, is a pulled rug that suggests uncertainty can be one of life's great joys, a quasi-mantra that echoes the rest Eight-pointed star: “On the way, I get lost.”
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