Marina and the Diamonds second album, Electra Heart, is not so much a creative leap forward, more an olympian pole-vault over the bar of talented-newcomer into the global amphitheatre of a cultivated classic. Two years on from her top 5 debut The Family Jewels, the self-styled avant-garde 'diy artist' has detonated her own experimental past and landed feet first in the future with Electra Heart, a stunningly ambitious, seamless, cohesive and confident sonic pulsar spinning between electro-pop euphoria and come-down melancholia. The album is produced by a cache of old school and a-list producers: Dr Luke (Katy Perry) and Liam Howe (Sneaker Pimps) but mostly (9 out of 12 songs) Greg Kurstin (Lily Allen, Kylie) and Rick Nowels (Madonna, Stevie Nicks, Lykke Li). A hook-packed stunner with the sonic ambition of a one-woman Depeche Mode, her onetime theatrical vocals now effortlessly soar between spectral, commanding and towering power-pop, finding her vocal identity in an album about a loss of it. The songs, mostly recorded in la in 2011, were written on-the-road through America in 2010, teased into life on Marina's 100 keyboard or sung into her lap-top in the back of her tour-bus bedroom, 'watching the corn fields flying by and making sense of the message that American culture employs; that you can be anyone and do anything, go anywhere and lose yourself- start afresh and forget whatever the truth is'. The song titles tell the story - from throbbing first single 'Primadonna' to the robo-pop of 'Bubblegum Bitch' to the haughty spoken-word soliloquies of 'Homewrecker' - a fantasy roll-call of 'Fairly Vengeful Characters'.
