Marina & The Diamonds - Hollywood

Hollywood the melting pot of the desperate and the famous, the epitome of the American Dream full of glitz glamour and sleaze. It provides an odd inspiration for the lead push for Britain’s Next Big Thing in pop. Yet, this single from Marina & the Diamonds seems not a cold grab for fame in the same way as vapid holes such as Ke$ha, it is instead a gloriously over the top example of the joy of pop muisc.

Still, it may not find many fans in the old school indie kids, who favour low-fi production values or the old rockists who like their guitars loud, but it doesn’t need these fans to succeed. With pop of this quality it should have no problems finding itself a wide audience, and even should it fail in doing so it is a creative success in itself.

Potential flaws such as the ‘marmite’ quality of Marina Diamandis’ voice (an almost masculine purr as the song begins) or the recalling of a supposed airport exchange (“he said “Oh. My Gawd. You look just like Shakira. No no, you’re Katherine Zeta” “Actually my name’s Marina”) that’s either cringe worthy or brilliant, depending on your tastes are all forgotten by the time the song reaches a chorus. So huge sounding are these that you can easily imagine venue roofs being blown off by the force.

Marina is bound to draw comparisons to her contemporaries, particularly Florence and the Machine as on first listen it’s all too easy to equate the twos over the top theatrical pop arrangements. In any real way, however, they’re nothing alike. Multiple listens reveal the trance keyboards and a million other snatches of sound that give ‘Hollywood’ the feel of the most expensive kitchen sink pop production of recent chart times. You could almost imagine the Glee cast covering it.