The process of learning and gaining knowledge is a bumpy and never-ending road. On her second full-length album 8 Pointed Star, singer-songwriter Marina Allen wanted to convey the spirit of an inexperienced and still ignorant beginner. This leads to a collection of songs with a spontaneous nature and full of introspective observations of dream places and dream loves. Allen hails from Los Angeles,
… and so does her richly and sensitively arranged music, which is firmly rooted in Laurel Canyon folk and country rock of the 1960s and '70s and thus connects with such contemporaries as Weyes Blood and Julia Holter. Strings are echoed by a wailing steel guitar in songs that sound dreamy, but also always have something prickly about them. With her warm-expressive voice, Allen takes the listener into a world of her own that is at once unmistakably on the West Coast of America. (MR)more
