On “No More Suckers,” Marina’s bratty, schoolyard-taunt delivery recalls Cher Lloyd’s excellent 2011 single “Want U Back,” elevating standard break-up fare into something witty and winking. “Baby,” a collaboration with Clean Bandit and Luis Fonsi, stands head and shoulders above every other track, even though it already appeared on Clean Bandit’s own album last fall. When Marina’s vocal delivery allows a glimmer of personality to shine through the genericism, the results are lovely. Greg Kurstin, who produced much of Electra Heart, may work with mega-stars like Adele and Ellie Goulding, but it’s hard to imagine either of them singing, “Wish I’d been a prom queen fighting for the title/Instead of being 16 and burning up a Bible/Feeling super, super, super suicidal.” Love + Fear’s gratuitous use of melodic math seems deliberate and freely chosen. But 2012’s Electra Heart also featured a battery of powerhouse collaborators, and still Marina’s distinct observations shone through. It’s tempting to blame new co-writers like OzGo, a producer who’s worked extensively with Martin, for pushing Marina toward a more easily digestible pop product. The chorus of “Emotional Machine” consists of facile rhyming: “I’m a machine/An emotional bein’/Since I was a teen/Cut my feelings off clean.” When Marina covered similar territory on 2010’s “I Am Not a Robot,” she wrote: “Better to be hated/Than loved, loved, loved for what you’re not/You’re vulnerable, so vulnerable/You are not a robot.” This is a staggering slide, from affecting poetry to cold calculation. Lyrics are occasionally nonsensical (“Stuck in fast forward, always on the rewind”) or simply sloppy (“My love is a planet revolving your heart”). This can be a useful compositional tool it can also be the reason Ariana Grande sings, “Now that I’ve become who I really are.” Though melodic math is wildly incompatible with Marina’s verbose, literary sensibility, Love + Fear is redolent of the stuff. Nowhere is this more evident than in Marina’s newfound dependence on “melodic math,” the Max Martin-pioneered songwriting technique that involves slotting syllables into an instrumental track, even if the resulting lyric is semi-incoherent. Safety, as an artistic priority, can shield creativity from anxiety. Without introspection, the lyrics of Love + Fear feel fully incidental to the songs swirling around them. “We don’t have the time to be introspective when there are more important things happening,” Marina recently told Fader. But the qualities that so endeared her to fans-her vulnerability, her appetite for risk, her unflinching handling of misogyny and mental illness-are absent here. Marina’s devoted following, and her many LGBTQ listeners in particular, rely on her for complex, indrawn alternatives to hollow empowerment anthems.
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