Marina Allen wields familiarity like a weapon. The Los Angeles-based singer-songwriter’s clear, quietly powerful voice sometimes recalls Carole King, sometimes Julia Holter, sometimes Maggie Rogers; her lush, Laurel Canyon-referencing production fits squarely within the ’70s folk-rock revival that’s been going on in Los Angeles for the better part of the last decade, epitomized by artists like Weyes Blood, Hand Habits, and Sam Burton. But for all the softness telegraphed in her music, Allen’s third album Eight Pointed Star is spiky and hard to pin down, its familiar environment camouflaging lyrics that can be vivid and fantastical.
What other album uses the image of eating bones as a key metaphor on two separate tracks? “I eat the meat/I eat the bones,” on the rollicking country-rock song “Swinging Doors,” becomes a rousing cry of self-assuredness. On the airy, ambling “Red Cloud,” consumption becomes a way into Allen’s personal history; she makes “a stew with rain water and frozen meat, thick with pine needles, warm beer and baby teeth,” and wakes up “dizzy in Red Cloud,” the Nebraska town from which her family hails. The song’s lazy haze masks the intensity with which Allen tries to condense hundreds of years of history into a pop song, placing herself in the center of it: “I am tainted, I am taught, to be tough, to be raw, to be ruined, to be wrecked/Like the women whose aching backs and blistered skin make me coffee and burnt bread.” Beneath Allen’s laid-back compositions are lyrics that seem to scratch and claw at their seams in search of meaning.
Allen’s lyrics have always been wordy—even the most accessible songs on her underrated 2022 album Centrifics, like the earwormy piano-bar tune “Or Else,” were written in long, knotty run-on sentences that stood at odds with the straightforward production. But the songs on Eight Pointed Star are more oblique and mystifying: They often take place in half-imagined, half-remembered places like the titular town in “Red Cloud” or the stretches of farmland Allen conjures on the fable-like “Bad Eye Opal.” Much of the album is ostensibly about Allen finding a sense of confidence—in art, in relationships, or in herself—and that confidence, true to the adage that the more you learn the less you know, results in songs that plant themselves firmly in life’s gray areas.
Even so, Allen stumbles upon complex truths that she delivers with steely resolve. Opener “I’m the Same,” a piece of serene, spacious Americana, at first seems so placid that it’s unrecognizable as a breakup song. But that calmness feels in line with Allen’s rebukes to a partner, which are frank and cutting in their clarity: “Feeling wronged is not the same as proof,” she sings, delivering the line with the casualness of someone who knows they’re in the right. It’s a rare moment of certainty, and by the record’s last song, “Between Seasons,” all she’s sure of is that change can be a great thing. It feels like a mirror image of “I’m the Same”: Instead of chastising a partner for not seeing her fully, she revels in the feeling of growth. But the final line, once again, is a rug pull that suggests uncertainty can be one of life’s great joys, a quasi-mantra that reverberates through the rest of Eight Pointed Star: “Right on track, getting lost.”
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Marina Allen: Eight Pointed Star