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MARINA ALLEN

Marina Allen

Eight Pointed Star

    The third album of powerfully vivid songwriting from Marina Allen. Beautifully orchestrated, highly melodic and delivered with unrivalled lyrical perspective. Across two acclaimed records, the Los Angeles-based singer-songwriter has ripened a rare harvest, but her third studio album is an arrival home.

    Taking fragments and stories from Marina’s past, Eight-Pointed Star deftly weaves together a new future, in what feels for all the world like a glittering, clear-eyed modern classic of alternative folk and Americana. For fans of Aldous Harding, Fiona Apple and Waxahatchee.

    Ineffable and timeless, this collection of songs holds a curiosity that’s as open to you as you are to them. Compared to the soaring and swelling compositions of Allen’s second album Centrifics or the innocent tranquillity of Candlepower, the world of Eight Pointed Star is more deeply addressing and open-armed. It favours a type of soul-searching that doesn’t dwell in complications, and is open to answers. Rolling guitars rise and fall with the canyons and dust is kicked-up from the red scarred earth. Allen’s vocals pure and crystalline whilst the instrumentation is rich and bursting with brightness. You can hear contentment radiating from the music, with Chris Cohen’s production offering a full-band affair.

    Allen’s affection runs deepest for singers who in her words can really sing, from The Roches to Karen Dalton, Joanna Newsom to Meredith Monk. But these influences vanish like ghosts in the attic when she starts to sing herself. Allen has a voice that stands up to the canon – inimitable – and it’s never sounded more resolute than it does here.

    TRACK LISTING

    A1 I'm The Same
    A2 Deep Fake
    A3 Red Cloud
    A4 Swinging Doors
    A5 Bad Eye Opal
    B1 Easy
    B2 Love Comes Back
    B3 Landlocked
    B4 Between Seasons

    Marina Allen

    Centrifics

      LA-based musician Marina Allen’s spectacular debut proper, and follow up to last years acclaimed 18 minute mini-opus, ‘Candlepower’.

      ‘Centrifics’ is a joyful collection of observations and questions about the self, the world, and how they interact. Awe-inspiring reflections accompany mesmerizing melodies while Allen’s extraordinary range and depth of singing showcases a wide array of influences from Karen Carpenter to Karen Dalton, from Joanna Newsom to Fiona Apple, from Cate Le Bon to Waxahatchee, via Meredith Monk and the New York avant-garde.

      Produced, engineered and mixed by Chris Cohen. Co-engineered by Jonny Kosmo.

      TRACK LISTING

      Side A
      A1 Celadon
      A2 Getting Better
      A3 Or Else
      A4 Smoke Bush
      A5 Superreality
      Side B
      B1 New Song Rising
      B2 Halfway Home
      B3 My Stranger
      B4 Foul Weather Jacket Drawing
      B5 Gardiner's Island

      Marina Allen

      Candlepower

        Marina Allen glides on angelic highs, surfing the husky deep; she is one of the great new voices of her generation. Writing songs that carry notes from other realms; these are kitchen table tales about love and fear, the capturing of the wild heart, sketching the breaking of dawn, bringing real life back to life. Every song on stunning debut album ‘Candlepower’ is a tick box of influences, asides, inspirations, quickfire theories, storylines and melodic progressions that galvanise a chemical reaction for each dramatic scene that unfolds on this genre-traversing seven song epic.

        One listen to opening track ‘Oh, Louise’ underlines the range of Marina’s talent, it’s a filmic play on words, with an arrangement that’s like a Kate Bush dream sequence. It’s the perfect foil for the plaintive strum of ‘Sleeper Train’, a haunting, folky paean fit for Judee Sill brought up to date with some echoey electric guitar; or the conversational ‘Believer’; with a nod to Joni Mitchell in the lyrics it sounds every bit like Simon And Garfunkel at their Big Apple best listening to the ‘7 O’Clock News’ re-imagined on Sunset. The stuff of legend for a voice that surfs many musical tangents, hovers, and persists, that stings with honesty; morphing from Karen Carpenter’s gentle reverence to Laura Nyro’s soulful grit, moving through the phases like some possessed Dada performance artist before throwing in a melody from Joni at her jazziest or from the close harmonies of the lamented Roches when they flipped out with Robert Fripp. ‘Candlepower’ is a juxtaposition of melodies, an achingly beautiful set of songs set against the clank of the mundane world, a beguiling commentary on the everyday and everywhere. It’s all here, in under 20 minutes… every second counts.

        TRACK LISTING

        A1 Oh, Louise
        A2 Original Goodness
        A3 Belong Here
        A4 Sleeper Tran
        B1 Believer
        B2 Ophelia
        B3 Reunion


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