by David Lefkowitz (@gymshortsdave)
Every artist arrives as the sum of their influences. They always have. For better or for worse or maybe for both, nobody can do more than dredge up that which they’ve already loved or hated. You can always dig deeper, sure, but you’d be hard pressed to find a square inch on the surface that’s yet to be touched. Hateful as it feels to say it sometimes, the act of creation is essentially just math. It’s an act of addition. A hack is one who just adds it all up and calls it a day. An artist finds a way to tilt those plus-signs 45 degrees, to magnify that which they’ve already been given. A genius, though, is one who puts forth a gestalt — who convinces you that, yes, 2+2 = 5, that it’s always equaled 5, and that tomorrow it may well equal 6.
In a world where everybody has heard — or, at least, can hear — every album in an instant, it’s tempting to adjectivize every artist who’s come before. To essentialize them to that which can most easily describe others. To call someone “Dylanesque” never means they’ve released a baffling if halfway-decent string of Christian albums. To compare a song to Aretha Franklin rarely means it sounds like a high-voltage mid-80s duet with George Michael. So it’s tempting, when listening to an album so lovingly steeped in the music of another era as Centrifics, to treat it like a skeet shoot. To take aim at each presumed influence as it streaks past you: “That’s Joni! Carole King! Coltrane! Perhacs! Buckley! Melanie!”
This isn’t to downplay the legitimate joy that can come from finding the fingerprints of an artist’s influences on the surfaces of their songs. Only to say that it’s not enough. In a post-streaming, post-nostalgia world, it’s far too easy to lose the quilt for the squares and to overlook the artistry that made the things beautiful to begin with.
Centrifics doesn’t shy away from its influences. The final stanza of the album’s closer, “Gardiner’s Island,” even interpolates the lines “tears of rage/tears of grief” before giving way to the free jazz flutterings of a saxophone. But it’s in the gentle surprises and delicate details of her craft that Marina Allen not only overcomes her influences but lives up to them.
As an object in itself, the album feels utterly unstuck from time. It’s evocative of the Laurel Canyonites of the late sixties, sure, but it refuses to paint within those lines. What sets it apart are Allen’s voice and the landscape which surrounds it, and it’s in the interplay of these that a third, intangible thing emerges.
Centrifics is, essentially, a collection of acoustic guitar and piano songs, accompanied throughout by warm electric bass, slouching drums, and perhaps the most tasteful woodwinds this world has yet seen. Allen’s voice has that special something-or-other that makes a person their own perfect back-up singer, and as her voice folds in on itself, it collapses in also to the horns behind it. People often talk about the voice as “just another instrument,” but Centrifics elevates the instrumentation to the level of other voices. In “Smoke Bush,” the vocal melody is echoed by a flute that sounds, in some ways, more like Allen than Allen herself. In “New Song Rising,” her delivery — low, soft, almost raspy — sounds as much like a saxophone as a human voice.
This partnership coalesces in “Foul Weather Jacket Drawing,” when Allen sings along to a trumpet solo in a way that can only accurately be described as “woman singing to her cat.” It’s completely unexpected, and yet it doesn’t for a second break you from the spell it’s got you under. If anything, the silliness of it only deepens the intimacy of the song.
That’s really what sets Centrifics apart: the quiet intimacy of it all. It really feels like Marina Allen is singing right to you. The first time you listen, it feels as though you’ve heard it a hundred times before, and yet the hundredth listen still feels like the first. There’s a thousand details to be dissected and a million influences to be unearthed, but none of that really matters, does it? Centrifics is ten great songs, wandering straight from her mouth to your ears, a little different every time. What’s not to love?