Love + Fear Acoustic EP - MARINA: Review
is a British pop singer formerly known as Marina And The Diamonds who just released her first record since 2015 earlier this year.
Reviewed By Lavender:
I reviewed Marina's comeback album Love + Fear earlier this year and was ultimately disappointed by it. The record features way more songs than it has good ideas and sees Marina sounding more out of touch than ever, especially given how creative of a voice she was in pop earlier this decade. I was hoping that acoustic versions of these tracks would add some intimacy that was missing in their original recordings, but unfortunately I think the EP is just the original vocal tracks from the album version of these songs, with a new instrumental added underneath rather than a re-recording.
I was excited to see the tracklist for this thing was populated by some of the better songs from the record, but very few of them actually hold up in acoustic form. Superstar is a track that gets much worse in this version because the instrumental just feels so randomly assembled and choppily put together. No More Suckers was one of the roughest tracks on the original Love + Fear and while I do like some of the instrumental changes the song is totally rotten at its core and there isn't enough here to redeem it. Orange Trees was by far my favorite song on the album and this is a far weaker version of it. The instrumental isn't really the right pacing or attitude for the upbeat, bright and poppy song and it just serves to kind of ruin the attitude it brings.
There are some songs here that I quite enjoy hearing in their acoustic capacity though. The opener is True which is a song I still enjoy when acoustic as it brings some pretty slick guitars to the song. While the hook doesn't hit quite as hard without the beat breakdown I think it does do a a better job of showing how talented Marina is as a vocalist and makes for a pretty good intimate moment. My favorite song of the bunch and the one I think makes the best transition to acoustic is Karma a track I thought was decent on the original record but one I really enjoy here. The track is soft and sweet in a way that translates over perfectly and makes for what I think is by far the most enjoyable song here.
Love + Fear Acoustic is a very modest attempt at adding some decent tunes onto an era that seemed to be dead on arrival. While I do like some of these versions of these track this whole era was unfortunately doomed from the very beginning and if I can't make the time to get back to the original album there certainly won't be any kind of precedent for the acoustic versions of these track. Despite being honestly a tighter more consistent listen than its big sister double album I think Love + Fear Acoustic is ultimately just as forgettable. 5/10
For more Marina check out my original review of Love + Fear here
And for more pop music check out my review of Lana Del Rey's Norman Fucking Rockwell here
