The One I Keep Confusing With Someone Else

The problem started with names. Marina and the Diamonds and Florence and the Machine occupy the same filing cabinet in my brain—similar structural logic, similar sonic expectation, filed too close together. A friend was obsessed with Florence and kept pushing the Berlin concert at me. I kept picturing the wrong artist. Which meant I’d been accidentally recommending Marina Diamandis to people when I’d meant to steer them elsewhere. That turned out fine, because Marina is better.

I mean that without hedging. I Am Not a Robot hit something specific when I first heard it—not just the melody, which is excellent, but the way her voice sits slightly apart from the production, performing at you from a corner of the room rather than from inside the speakers. Obsessions does the same thing. There’s a control to it that paradoxically makes the whole thing feel uncontrolled, like someone very deliberately losing their composure.

The new video for Mowgli’s Road is weirder than either of those songs suggested. The concept arrived through genuine creative conviction or a fever, and I don’t think the distinction matters—it works. The song is more chaotic, more vaudeville, and her voice is still doing that corner-of-the-room thing even when everything around it is basically shouting.

The debut album, The Family Jewels, is due in early 2010. By the time it arrives, the venues will be significantly larger than they need to be—she’s the kind of artist who spreads the way only artists with actual voices spread, not because someone pushed it but because one person told another who told another.

I got there by accident. That might be the best way.