Marina's 'Ancient Dreams in a Modern Land' Is a Call to Action Without a Voice
On Marina Diamandis’ fifth album, earworm melodies and stunning vocals are clouded by hollow platitudes and unexplored themes, proving the conceptual singer still has some thinking to do
The last time Marina Diamandis released an album, the world was a very different place. 2019’s LOVE + FEAR was only a couple of years ago, but there was no sign of a global pandemic, Donald Trump was still the president of the United States (though, arguably, not much has changed since that ended), and we weren’t constantly inundated with sentences that began with, “In these uncertain times.” Diamandis was different too. After shedding her “& the Diamonds” stage surname to become a mononym, Marina was reinventing herself once again, something her career had become quite famous for. When she started on the U.K. alt-pop scene in 2010, she sounded like a mix of Kate Bush and Kate Nash, with a springy, theatrical voice that drew acclaim for her debut album The Family Jewels. Two years later, you couldn’t scroll down a Tumblr dashboard without seeing the hyper-stylized imagery from Marina’s Electra Heart era, where she ran through different archetypes like Housewife and Homewrecker to playfully dissect cultural ideas of modern womanhood, sex, and relationships. And in 2015, she peeled back a few layers of the artifice for FROOT, a technicolor-hued album where she began to deftly traverse into the existential and political.
When Marina returned in early 2019 after a four-year hiatus that found her pondering a continued career in music and taking psychology classes at Birkbeck University of London, fans were looking forward to more of her signature introspective songwriting, the kind that often ruminated on larger themes as they played out inside the human psyche — like questioning if chasing after notoriety is worth wasting time on Earth in “Immortal” while contending that fear with the desire to have influence in “Are You Satisfied?” Instead, LOVE+FEAR was uncharacteristically literal, never quite managing to dive deeper than surface-level, even on its most ambitious songs. Musically, the album was a departure for Marina as well, full of more generic, mainstream pop productions. It wasn’t a total misfire, songs like “Handmade Heaven” and “Orange Trees” were showcases for Marina’s most powerful tool: her supremely lovely mezzo-soprano voice. Still, both sonically and thematically, Marina was still finding her footing when it came to creating the music that wore only her name.
On her new album out today, Ancient Dreams in a Modern Land, Diamandis is still trying to find a perfect marriage between MARINA the artist and Marina the person. This new record seems somewhat of a response to the criticisms of LOVE + FEAR’s safe nature, attempting to cast a wide net over the social, political, and environmental issues that plague the world with a return to innovative, stimulating production that blends elements of pop polish with gritty guitars and relentless drums. Marina told The FADER in 2019 that, “We don’t have the time to be introspective when there are more important things happening. I feel a desire to put positive things into the world.” And it seems as though she’s finally back in a space where she can properly relinquish the niceties of her last record to address issues with a little more gusto.
Though Marina may not be pulling any punches or playing it necessarily safe this time around, that doesn’t always translate to songs that have much to actually say. The scope of Ancient Dreams in a Modern Land is worldwide, with half the album racing to tackle as many issues as it can in a limited, 10-track runtime. This causes the songwriting to often feel clumsy, with subjects stumbling into each other as if Diamandis wrote phrases like “CLIMATE CHANGE” and “FARMS IN CRISIS” down on little scraps of paper, put them into one well-constructed, couture chapeau, and shook them all up. The parts are there, they sound good, but do they really mean anything?
On the album’s lead single, “Man’s World,” Marina sings about her perpetual frustration with being a woman in a universe still controlled by men. It’s an interesting enough concept and one that Marina certainly is an expert in as a woman artist in an industry that is indisputably dominated by powerful, toxic men. The problem with the song’s messaging — and that of others on the album as well — is that Marina is so busy adorning base-level sentiments with vivid imagery and references (Boucher cherubs, Marilyn Monroe’s bungalow) that she doesn’t realize those things are merely flowery embellishments, they haven’t unearthed anything new from the subject matter. “If you have a mother, daughter, or a friend/Maybe it’s time, time you comprehend/The world that you live in ain’t the same one as them,” she sings in the song’s post-chorus. There’s not a lick of subtlety here, which is fine, but the question of, “Would you think the same if it was your mother or your daughter?” is just so far from being a new idea, and yet it’s landing as the song’s big centerpiece. Here it is: the entire point laid out before us, no extra philosophical positioning or self-reflection to be done. “Man’s World” assumes that the listener hasn’t run into this kind of commonplace questioning before. The song has hit a wall of cliche before it can ever explore more interesting ideas plucked from its writer’s bevy of personal experiences.
Following “Man’s World” is “Purge The Poison,” an ambitious track that unfolds at a breakneck pace, but holds the same vexing reluctance to really delve into the subjects that it’s trying to cover. Marina writes from the perspective of Mother Nature trying to save the world, spinning a giant wheel of buzzwords, and trying to fit them all into two verses before the wheel stops spinning and the world returns to its complacency. Reference-heavy lyrics like, “2007 when size zero was the rage, Britney shaved her head and all we did was call her crazed/Harvey Weinstein gone to jail, MeToo went on to unveil/Truth in all its glory, the ending of a story” feel more like platitudes than the clever observations that filled so much of Marina’s first three records. The song’s absurdly catchy instrumentals and rapid pacing are its best qualities — propelled by drums, guitars, and the occasional glittering synth, a listener barely has the chance to pause and realize that all of these lyrics ripped from the headlines aren’t as allegorical as they need to be in order to make a broader statement.
The worst case can be found in “New America,” a song that seems like it was written by someone who only just became cognizant of the atrocities that the United States was built on. In a recent interview, Marina told Billboard, “[The song] was written after the murder of George Floyd. I started it, I think, around that time, and then didn’t really touch it again for six months.” Here, Marina is tackling everything from genetically modified food to systemic racism, and, once again, not saying anything that several other artists and activists haven’t said already, oftentimes more eloquently and intricately. “You can only hope that it’s received in the way that it was intended,” she told Billboard. But good intentions aren’t enough when the subjects at hand deserve much more space for examination than you can give them in one 3-minute, 53-second song. The hesitation to probe deeper into the themes written about in “New America” feels disappointing and unfair, like writing a song to trick audiences into giving you woke points just because you were listening. Maybe it’s Marina’s way of saying she’s no longer “obsessed with the mess that’s America” and, in fact, sees some room for change, but it never sticks the self-referential landing that would make its place on this album meaningful.
The heavy-handed lyricism of some of the tracks on Ancient Dreams in a Modern Land feels so surprising because of Marina’s successful track record of taking larger themes and examing them through the lens of her own experience. Songs like “Hollywood,” “Sex Yeah,” and “Savages” — each from a different album — dissected things like America’s obsession with celebrity culture, sexuality taught through media, and violence against women, respectively. So much of her fifth album, then, feels designed to harken back to those well-loved, introspective songs while never reaching their same depths. These are hollow artistic reproductions sold at museum gift shops — you can buy the laser-printed carbon copy, it looks just as good, but it’s never as affecting as the real thing.
That isn’t to say that there is not some genuinely great stuff here. The album’s title track avoids falling into the same trappings of its similarly flashy yet lyrically empty songs by staying philosophical. Lyrics that could easily seem preachy and trite transform into genuinely impactful statements, aided by Marina’s unflinching sincerity. “I am not my body, not my mind or my brain/Not my thoughts or feelings, I am not my DNA/I am the observer, I’m the witness of life/I live in the space between the stars and the sky,” she sings in the song’s chorus, incorporating theatrical adlibs that make it just as fun as it is existential.
“Venus Fly Trap” is, likewise, an exciting romp through all of the trials of being a woman artist — though, I do think lyrics like “I’m a millionairess!” contrasted with the criticisms of capitalist society found on “Purge The Poison” do help to reveal that Marina’s songwriting is still at war with her own personal life.
The album’s back half is less frenetic and more introspective, an extremely welcome change of pace from the swirling tornado of headline-plucked buzzwords in its first six songs. “I Love You But I Love Me More” and “Flowers” would both fit nicely on Marina’s strongest album, FROOT, where subtle ruminations on relationships and being human transformed themselves into bold, fleshed-out works. These songs are further proof that Marina’s songwriting is still at its best when she looks inward to channel her own life and experiences into songs that don’t necessarily set out to speak about larger rot in the system but often find their way there on their own.
There was a time when Marina wasn’t so concerned with getting it right. She was averse to conceptualizing her songs with such literality. She may not have always arrived at a sure statement by the end of a track or an album, but her work was made more interesting for it. Her perpetual wondering and openness to feelings made it authentic; she was constantly exploring what it meant for her to be a human and, more importantly, to be a woman. Marina’s struggle with tackling a broader scope on her last two albums proves that she’s still working to achieve a balance. “It’s definitely tricky to organize thoughts on really important subjects, and at the end of the day, whatever people think, that's just how I've been able to deal with that at the time,” she told Billboard. Now that the veil has been lifted, she just needs to spend a little more time looking around and taking it all in. If saving the world requires a call to action, Marina is still finding her voice.