Sparkadia - Mary

What would you do if the band you’d thrown everything into slowly started collapsing, with various members leaving one by one until you’re literally the last man standing? It’s the sad tale of countless could-have-been bands down the years and Sparkadia looked like another such victim of circumstance, for this is precisely what happened to them. Tempting though it must have been to say “Hm, well, that didn’t work, did it? I might have a bit of a mooch around the Job Centre on Monday”, lead singer Alex Burnett - the solitary surviving member - bravely picked himself up and continued, teaming up with Florence & The Machines’ producer Mark Tieku, to create album ‘The Great Impression’, due in March.

‘Mary’ is the lead single, and as such it swoops and soars with impressive grandiose clout, but the main issue is Burnett’s squeezed semi-falsetto, which you either find fascinatingly tortured or just a little bit irksome. The saving grace is the tragic swagger of the song, sounding like the glittering, overblown finale to a torch singer’s set at the end of another gig in a dive full of unimpressed, drunk punters. ‘Mary’ has a dignified grace and beauty, combined with a hint of madness and heartache but it still falls slightly short of finding a way to turn itself from an ugly duckling into a swan. Like the troubled tale of Sparkadia itself, the track is a triumph of will over adversity, but something to be admired rather than entirely capturing your heart.