Marina Allen (USA) supported by Hot Apple Band (Syd)

MARINA ALLEN - EIGHT POINTED STAR

A new Marina Allen album comes like the first day of Spring. The sky has blued; a clear air descends.

Through the green fuse drives a flower. Across two introductory records, the Los Angeles-based

singer-songwriter has ripened a rare harvest, but her third studio album is an arrival home. Taking

fragments and stories from Marina’s past, Eight-Pointed Star deftly weaves together a new future, in

what feels for all the world like a glittering, clear-eyed modern classic of alternative folk and

Americana.

“As much as you can have will and ambition,” she says, “those things often get in the way of a

fluidity to life, and where you’re supposed to be. You can make yourself dizzy wanting to be

somewhere you’re not. My first album, Candlepower, had this sparkly energy around it – I think of it

very fondly. With Eight-Pointed Star I’m trying to harness that beginner’s mind again, while having

the scars and wisdom that come from biting into the fruits of knowledge.”

Growing up in New Jersey on the East Coast, and then moving to California at the age of ten, Allen’s

primary musical education was spent singing in community churches and school choirs. Her affection

runs deepest for singers who in her words can really sing, from The Roches to Karen Dalton, Joanna

Newsom to Meredith Monk. But these influences vanish like ghosts in the attic when she starts to sing

herself. Allen has a voice that stands up to the canon – inimitable – and it’s never sounded more

resolute than it does here. Her songs hold a dynamism that conjure distinctive worlds of their own.

The eponymous eight-pointed star welcomes an assembly of images. This is an album about

discovery, searching with the eight points of a compass; about hope, gazing at the emanations within

the eight points of a North Star; and about ancestry, being comforted by the eight-pointed stitching

patterns used in quilt-making. There’s more writing here about love than in any of her previous work,

and trying to understand it in its fullest sense.