Here’s an affecting companion piece to Caroline Polachek’s recently acclaimed Pang: another breakup album with production handled by one of the PC Music collective, who rescue trance-pop sonics from the tyranny of good taste. Polachek’s record featured work by Danny L Harle, while Diamond’s is produced by AG Cook. Where Polachek is erudite and poetic, Diamond is prosaic; where Polachek’s vocals are astonishingly skilful, swooping into high registers, Diamond’s are unremarkably ordinary.
Except they are remarkable, in their way. Diamond has a naive style of delivery, like a teenage girl singing to herself in her bedroom, and combined with the deliberately simple lyrics (“You said let’s kiss / I said nothing / maybe I should / have said something”) she reminds us of how love, and particularly heartbreak, make us as needy, baffled and inarticulate as children. The baldness of her pain can be chilling, particularly on Love Goes On where she is merely existing, “staying alive til I die”: the flipside to everlasting love is that it goes on even when you don’t want it to.
The melancholic effect is heightened with the kind of nagging nursery-rhyme melodies used in trance hits such as Better Off Alone and Castles in the Sky, and indeed there is a brilliantly donk-laden – but no less sad – club banger in Concrete Angel. Some songs threaten to mope, with the mid-song pace occasionally sagging. Diamond is better suited to the pep and prettiness of Shy and Fade Away, when she takes the first near-unconscious steps of moving on.
