We have said it innumerable times before in the context of alchemical and autochthonous bands like Stereophonics, Manic Street Preachers, and The Joy Formidable. We have said it in vain attempts to retroactively earn our contemporary understandings of philosophy, medicine, mathematics, and astronomy. However, let’s say it once more with feeling, for we have a newfound, correlative cause: Thank you, Wales. Thank you, Greece. This time round, our heartfelt journalistic jubilations are offered in exchange for the gift you Cymru mushes and Homeric heroes gave the world in the form of Marina Lambrini Diamandis, who seared her starlight-entrained name across the stage at Atlanta’s Coca-Cola Roxy like the midnight Fury of a woman she incontestably is on Monday, February 28th.
Any dedicated student of history would be hard-pressed to conjure two cultures more kingly and distinct than those belonging to Wales and Greece. The separate artistic and cultural contributions of these two lands to the world’s discourse on everything from sound to food would require whole lifetimes to even moderately delineate. To think of first combining all of their best individual itinerant enchantments, and then pouring the potion-ized result into a silvery dark-sylph of a mercury-made girl might get you half the way to visualizing Marina before you have had the pleasure of encountering her in the Real.
With all the combined magic of her dual Welsh-Greek heritage, alloyed with a lacquer of cool that can, quite frankly, be attained absolutely nowhere else on Earth but London, England – where she has resided for most of her adult life since working her way there to actively chase down her destiny as a professional singer – Marina appeared before her frenetic Atlanta crowd as a supernatural source of sibylline soothsaying in saturated rouge. It is perhaps a further piece of fatidic fluke that she is touring during the current Pisces stellium of 2022, as she herself is very much a gathering of three planets in a single zodiac sign and, seemingly, the manifestation of a Jupiter mere mortals could only hope to share sky with.
Put bluntly, Marina is Catwoman. She slinked onto the stage with the tour/album eponymous tune “Ancient Dreams In A Modern Land” like a pleather-clad lynx with some sinister secrets. Marina is also a performer and choral contortionist from a bygone time. She is vestal and cabalistic, meaning that the Ancient Dreams in a Modern Land Tour could not be more aptly named. Manga-doe eyes mapped with multilevel mascara, she will put you immediately in mind of Pythia, the fictionalized version of the oracle of Delphi as depicted in 300, and you more than expect her hair to be braided with abalone as even it seems to have an innate understanding of how music moves the air.
As this word-woman heard it perfectly put by a dear friend, you could as easily see Marina twisting her acrobatic body and voice alongside coiled cobras and flame-dancers with stippled tattoos in the gilded environs of Roman emperors as you could envision her in any acoustic listening room, theater, or stadium of this current era in time. She makes a blue heeler dog out of the word “versatility” simply by walking in the room. Calling what Marina calls down from the ancient papyri “pop” would be the radio hoax of the century, though all readers should consider themselves hereby formally challenged to find a woman on the waves today with any more raw ability to deliver an ear-eel.
The four-quadrant blockbuster that was her second record, Electra Heart, off which the Atlanta crowd was treated to “How To Be A Heartbreaker”, “Teen Idle”, and “Bubblegum Bitch”, featured heavily at this show, as did her sportive, unpredictable moves reminiscent of Thai boxing, or the undulations of any tossing sea tidally locked to its star. That Electra in Greek mythology is the goddess of the Sea Clouds, the origin of our word “electricity,” and believed by the ancients to be the girl with the lightning in her pockets should escape no one.
Rich pickings of Marina classics like “Hollywood”, “I Am Not A Robot”, “Oh No!”, and “Froot” effectively made the dancefloor of this concert a street built by mantic, nostalgic imps, all faces glowing upward at their Unseelie-like widow of Apollo, who even sings as though she is indeed drawing her towering tones straight down from the Parthenon. Marina, like her twin cultural roots, is dearly diminutive in physical size, and beyond behemoth in projective power. The sheer capacity and volume of her voice is reversely proportional to her petite stature and, this writer believes, yet to be captured fully in the vocal box of any studio she has graced. This, among so many other chapters and verses, is why everyone must head out to share in the Ancient Dreams in a Modern Land tour with Marina and her traveling Acropolis of ambidextrous artistry.
Setlist
- Ancient Dreams In A Modern Land
- Venus Fly Trap
- Froot
- Man’s World
- Are You Satisfied?
- I Am Not A Robot
- Oh No!
- Purge The Poison
- Handmade Heaven
- Hollywood
- Happy
- Forget
- Can’t Pin Me Down
- Teen Idle
- Highly Emotional People
- I Love You But I Love Me More
- How To Be A Heartbreaker
- Bubblegum Bitch
