Marina and the Diamonds: The Family Jewels

A lot of intriguing musical reference points have been thrown at singer-songwriter Marina Diamandis: her backing group the Diamonds, like ­Florence's ­Machine, don't actually exist. It shouldn't perhaps be a surprise that she's being hailed as the new Kate Bush, this being apparently mandatory for any white female singer who doesn't appear in the public consciousness bearing a spray tan, a sad backstory about an ­ailing relation and the earnest assurance to Dermot O'Leary that singing is her life and she really, really wants this. More striking are the other names that have been mentioned in conjunction with her own, none of which exactly square with an artist whose single ­Hollywood is ­currently in the Top 20: Laura Nyro, Sparks, Super Furry Animals and ­Aphrodite's Child, the demented prog rock band in which Vangelis and Demis Roussos originally plied their trade.

The latter turns out to have less to do with music than Diamandis's half-Greek, half-Welsh background, which seems a shame: Aphrodite's Child's stock-in-trade was lengthy songs about the ­imminent apocalypse sung in a tremulous warble, which is something you don't get too much of in the charts these days. Still, the most apposite ­comparison may be even more ­recherche: Lene Lovich, the plait-haired, boggle-eyed one-hit ­wonder who had previously found ­gainful employ as a ­professional screamer in horror movies. The Lovich comparison seems fitting not because anything on The Family Jewels sounds especially like her 1979 smash Lucky Number – rather than taut new-wave guitars, it's based around piano, decorated with frantically arpeggiating synthesisers, electro bass, thumping Adam and the Ants drums, the occasional touch of Auto-Tune – but because of the panoply of vocal tics Diamandis applies over the course of the album. These variously include a bleating vibrato, animal ­impersonations, shrieking, doing funny voices – ­Cockney geezer, drawling American, mannered posho, take-me-to-your-leader robot, Frank Spencer, Jimmy Saville and so on – and the reliable watch-out-­everybody-I'm-a-bit-nutty staccato. This is a ­technique in which eveRY othER ­sylLAble IS draMAtiCALly OVer-­EMphaSISed, the better to convey to the listener the same message ­Diamandis subtly communicates during The ­Outside by screaming, "I'm a fucking WILD CARD," at the top of her voice.

You could argue that this kind of thing represents a reaction to the post-Mariah-Carey-heavily-melismatic-Waaah!-Bodyform! style that X Factor voters seem to believe represents the apogee of distaff vocal achievement. The more cynically minded might suggest that, at root, it's actually no different: a load of irritating ­vocal tics designed to convey a depth of ­emotion that, if it ­actually existed in the ­performance in the first place, wouldn't need a load of irritating vocal tics to convey it. Certainly, you could argue that it's equally predictable. Just as you know that sooner or later the female singer who tends to the heavily-melismatic-Waaaah!-Bodyform! style will sing a song about reachin' for her dreams, so within ­seconds of The ­Family ­Jewels' opening, you're gripped by the absolute ­certainty that, at some point, this album will feature a Brecht and Weill-influenced oompah-oompah song in which the I'm-a-bit-nutty staccato is deployed as if it's about to be declared ­illegal. And so to track four, Girls: oompah-oompah, all YOU say IS blah-BLAH-blah.

As you might imagine, this amount of affectation is a bit exhausting: you get the impression that ­Diamandis couldn't tell you where the nearest cashpoint is without crossing her eyes, blowing a raspberry and doing quote marks with her fingers every other word. It's also counterproductive: the closer she gets to herniating herself trying to convince you that you're listening to a crazy avant-garde ­artist making pop music by accident, the more convinced you become that she's a canny operator writing pop songs and then dressing them up in a multicoloured afro wig and glasses with eyeballs on springs. For the most part, they're really good pop songs, too. Diamandis has a strong ­melodic facility that expresses ­itself in ­indelible choruses. "We've got ­obsessions," runs the chorus of ­Obsessions. As the chords rise triumphantly behind it, the final note droops dejectedly: it's a little thing, but it's more powerful than all the album's ­amateur dramatics put ­together. The ­lovely delicacy of I Am Not a Robot's tune is easy to miss when there's a woman doing Dalek voices over the top of it. Such are the dangers of trying a little too hard.