Marina Allen – Eight Pointed Star (2024) [FLAC 24bit/44,1kHz]

Marina Allen – Eight Pointed Star (2024)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/44,1 kHz | Time – 32:34 minutes | 331 MB | Genre: Folk, Singer-Songwriter, Female Vocal
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Fire Records

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.On her third album, California singer-songwriter Marina Allen makes a strong case that she is not just another folky-Americana girl with a guitar. There is no manic-pixie cuteness to songs like “I’m the Same,” which channels the Roches and compels by pairing off-kilter rhythm and a wandering piano that incongruously travel their own paths at the same time; Allen’s voice, no wallflower, lifts and swells and grabs your attention. Likewise, the chiming folk of “Deep Fake” is almost like a traffic jam—piano and pedal steel and busy drums as separate vehicles driving to the same place in their own way. The singer performs acrobatics on “Red Cloud,” diving deep for a second then flying and letting her voice fall, like a paper airplane drifting as Odessa Jorgensen’s violin acts like a duet partner. Allen’s words run fast in what seems like stream of consciousness: “Like the engine that rolls on a crooked track that hauls along lost pocket clocks and cents singing cycles, in song, a loop, in ink, on my palm, the name and number I could call, to break the spell, to break the lock.” The song is named for the Nebraska prairie town that is the home of her family, as well as writer Willa Cather, a big influence on Allen—who paints this place as geographically desolate yet teeming with creative life. On “Landlocked,” with its swaying country-Americana melody and lonesome pedal steel from Tim Ramsey, she probes the costs of globalization. “This road was once a river/ This home an orange grove/ And where the factories are built/ Painted horses roamed,” she sings, as Jorgenson’s violin weeps with romantic ache for an America long lost. Allen trills like a songbird on smoky “Between Seasons” and tries on a vocal syncopation of her own design for “Easy,” smoothing over the quirky edges with doe-eyed harmonies. Driving “Love Comes Back” is Velvet Underground-esque, and “Swinging Doors” is wild and appealing in the vein of Waxahatchee. Allen has called it both an ode to risk and an ode to trust, comparing the excitement of something new to “the butterflies you get in the line at Six Flags or in the car on a first date.” And she’s not leaving a crumb of that joy: “I eat the meat, I eat the bones,” she sings on repeat. – Shelly Ridenour

Tracklist:

1-1. Marina Allen – I’m the Same (04:13)
1-2. Marina Allen – Deep Fake (03:27)
1-3. Marina Allen – Red Cloud (04:06)
1-4. Marina Allen – Swinging Doors (02:36)
1-5. Marina Allen – Bad Eye Opal (03:27)
1-6. Marina Allen – Easy (04:31)
1-7. Marina Allen – Love Comes Back (02:50)
1-8. Marina Allen – Landlocked (03:48)
1-9. Marina Allen – Between Seasons (03:32)

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