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Originally Posted by xLuna&1LOVE
Ok... that's kinda harsh.
You know, it's quite funny. I sat in the car yesterday with my friend and we have been listening to the album. Put it on shuffle, so we didn't listen it in the meant to be order. My friend, who's not really into MARINA by the way, found most of the songs quite unlistenable for the same reasons you have stated there. A lot of repeating, songs that sound almost the same, generic.
I on the other hand, don't really mind. Most of the times I am into a good melody and I think that both Love + Fear have easy melodies I can follow. That's why I don't really like her first album, thought it was messy, Electra Heart was a good start, but FROOT was for me uninteresting in some way.
Handmade Heaven sparked my interest again and it was for Orange Trees to start liking the direction she is going. It felt more light-hearted. Good music, that don't really require innovative sounds/arrangements or difficult to understand lyrics.
Did MARINA really set the bar high with Love + Fear? I doubt it. But I like the concept, and her using her classes in psychology to put a decent album together. Maybe you experience some lack in depthness, because she really arranged the album in one half: happy, lovely, friendly, care-free, and the other half in anxiety, sadness, and carefulness. It doesn't come together, because as she stated herself: once you are in a place of love, you can't be in a place of fear and vice versa. I think she put much effort in the concept and seperating the songs by mood/vibe, that it might give some listeners, like you, the feeling that the songs sound kinda the same or are filled with 'meh'-songs just to keep the album going. Perhaps if she mixed both albums, she wouldn't be including the songs.
Anyway, I don't mind the division between the two albums. I like singing along with some, and other songs I will skip. I haven't been listening to Fear throughout, to be honest - so I will give this one a go once I am in my car.
Somehow I am really enjoying the 'radio-friendly' / easy-to-listen-to sound of this album. The songs you mentioned are to me sometimes too hard to listen to, or hard to put in any mood. Love + Fear, how generic it might be, is for me a good, light-hearted album I really enjoy. It sparked my interest in MARINA again.
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So, lyrically, by comparison and performance, look at songs like "I Am Not A Robot", "Oh No!", "Primadonna", "Froot", and even softer tracks like "Fear and Loathing" and "I'm A Ruin". There's a lot of inventiveness happening between Marina and the music, and it's odd to me that a lot of people don't hear how stark of a difference there is between her songwriting and performance now versus then. It just doesn't add up. Almost like she took that song "Baby" a little too far.
This reminds me of Ellie Goulding when she did Delirium. Now, I liked the songs on Delirium regardless, but Delirium was such a non-Ellie Goulding record that I think a lot of fans were wholly split over it. By comparison, Halcyon was such a sharp, messy but polished, visceral and layered record. Love + Fear feels like Marina's Delirium. I just can't see Marina staying this route for her next album. I mean, look at Ellie, every interview she's had about her upcoming fourth album has been "this next album is definitely written by me," and other reassurances that clearly show Ellie saw the flaws in Delirium. I'm hard-pressed to believe Marina will do the same in a few years.
Just FYI, I've been a huge fan since she debuted "I Am Not A Robot" on MySpace. So, I'm familiar with Marina from way back to when Marina was just a MySpace user with a music account. I don't get a lot of her more recent music, but a lot of that stems from Marina being a very cryptic songwriter. Just like in "Believe in Love", Marina can pack an entire treatise on emotional welfare and self-control in 2-4 short lines: "And my mood, it changes all the time / I smile with tears in my eyes". I'm not against Marina going a simpler, less cryptic route, but there's such a thing as oversimplifying, and I genuinely think that Marina either wrote this album because her label wanted a pop record, because she truly thinks most pop sounds this generic, or something. Like I said, if this wasn't intended as a joke good songwriters tell about the minimal effort of popular music, it feels like it missed the mark.