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Review: 'Detroit, Marcella'
'Gray Matterz'   

-  Album: 'Gray Matterz' -  Label: 'Make Zee Records'
-  Genre: 'Pop' -  Release Date: '22nd April 2016'

Our Rating:
Marcella Detroit – the one in Shakespeare’s Sister who wasn’t the brunt of The Mary Whitehouse parody of their immense 90s hit ‘Stay’ and who wasn’t the one previously in Bananarama – has released four previous solo albums since 1999. The last, however, was in 2005, and her comeback, ‘Grey Matterz’ (released stateside last year), suggests she’s spent most of the last (lost) decade revisiting the music of the years shortly after she was famous. In fairness, she is now 63 (although you wouldn’t know it by looking at her, or listening to her voice for that matter – is the title a reference? Perhaps), and has been active as a musician since 1972 and having worked alongside the likes of Bob Seeger and Eric Clapton. But that all makes ‘Grey Matterz’ all the more of an anomaly.

The album’s first track, ‘Digital Age’, is a haunting, piano-led song which a simmering electronic bass pulse which transitions into a dramatic and shimmering 80s electro-pop style piece with a melody that evokes a strange sense of déjà vu. It’s by no means the last time on the album that the ghosts of other songs and artists loom large.

‘Turn Up the Volume’ brings thumping disco to the party: half Little Boots, half Madonna, it shows that Marcella isn’t one to submit readily to the conventions of being a more ‘mature’ recording artist. Credit to her, she does a decent enough job of it. She keeps the glittering eurobeats vibe on the club-friendly ‘Drag Queen’, which sounds a bit Top 40 chart music circa 2002, and the hookline ‘last night I kissed a drag queen’ is a bit too much of a Katy Perry hand-me-down to really wash.

The trouble is, after a time, the retro dance thing gets quite monotonous, and ‘The Nothing Life’ is a bit Robert Miles. The same pumping 4/4 dance beat continues into ‘Home’, which goes all epic and soulful and introduces a sense of theatre.

‘U N Me’ leans heavily on ‘You’re Not Alone’ by Olive, and ‘Not Just a Number’ sounds like a Kylie castoff, but with a glammy dance stomp, it’s a half-decent pop song, at least.

It isn’t until the album’s penultimate track, ‘Lighthouse; that Marcella reprises the soaring higher pitches she’s likely best remembered for. The final track is a softer, slower, reflective song, and proves to be one of the album’s strongest moments, not least of all by virtue of not sounding like it’s rooted in millennial dance culture. It’s all rather too, little too late, on an album that sounds awkwardly out of step.

Marcella Detroit Online

  author: Christopher Nosnibor

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Detroit, Marcella - Gray Matterz