Released last week, Marina Diamandis‘ fifth studio album, Ancient Dreams in a Modern Land, looks on the surface to be a scaled-back effort by her own recent standards; compared to 2019’s sprawling double album Love + Fear or 2015’s lengthy, genre-slaloming Froot, the 10-song track listing and swift turnaround time for Ancient Dreams suggest something more quickfire.
On that front, appearances have proven deceptive; the record is no less ambitious than we’ve become accustomed to from the consistently thoughtful Diamandis, delving deeply into femininity from both personal and political perspectives.
A similarly bold livestream concert marked the release with an hour-long, career-spanning set shot in the Californian desert that, as the artist noted on Instagram, represented an onerous undertaking – if for no other reason than that “setting up a full stage in the middle of nowhere is no joke.”
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The impressive, if slightly incongruous setting lent Diamandis a dramatic backdrop against which to run through most of Ancient Dreams – only ‘Flowers’ missed the cut – as well as a smartly chosen smattering of older material that neatly complemented the new.
‘I Am Not a Robot’s clarion call against homogeneity followed cleverly on the heels of the similarly broiling ‘New America’, penned in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, whilst a fizzing double bill from 2012’s Electra Heart, ‘How to Be a Heartbreaker’ and ‘Bubblegum Bitch’, reinfused the show with a sense of fun after the quietly devastating ‘To Be Human’, and put her five-piece band’s rock chops to the test.
What is difficult to shake, though, is the feeling that this was less a live show than one very long music video.
It is par for the course by now for live-streamed gigs, especially those that are technically challenging to pull off to begin with, to be pre-recorded and then ‘premiered’ at a given time; that’s obviously prudent, as last month’s Live at Worthy Farm debacle reminded us that even a minor hitch can completely derail an event. Live from the Desert was apparently shot over several days, but the end result was something really too slick for its own good.
The camerawork was often dizzying, with rapid-fire cuts around the band defining the uptempo songs, and the audio sounded as if it had been touched up after-the-fact to the point that it barely sounded live any more and, at certain points, gave off the uncanny impression that Diamandis was miming – which she wasn’t.
As a showcase for the new songs, it still worked; self-care anthem ‘I Love You But I Love Me More’ was no less moving, the intelligent balladry of ‘Highly Emotional People’ no less honest.
But the appeal of these streamed gigs over the past year or so has been that they offer an approximation of the live experience – the spontaneity, the connection between artist and audience, and the crackle of possibility – that what we’re going to get is an experience different from the one we have with the record at home. In that regard, Live from the Desert was too polished, putting artifice over artistry.
