MARINA - Handmade Heaven - Single [Review]

Welsh/Greek indie pop / indie rock musician Marina Lambrini Diamandis (formerly known professionally as Marina and the Diamonds and now merely as MARINA) is finally following up her 2015 album Froot (which I reviewed here) with her fourth studio album. Not much about the album has been revealed yet; we have yet to know the release date or the title, and we have not yet seen the cover art. (MARINA has stated, however, that more information will be coming on Valentine's Day.) Although MARINA did release a single titled "Baby" in November of last year (a song on which she is the lead vocalist and which she even co-wrote), the song was technically a Clean Bandit song with MARINA featured as a guest vocalist, so "Handmade Heaven" is the first song released on which she is the lead artist since she released "Blue" as a single in the summer of 2015, so it has been nearly four years. Marina fans like myself have therefore been highly anticipating this release, and while the song is hardly her greatest achievement thus far, it is definitely a fairly strong comeback. "Handmade Heaven" is a relatively slow ballad reminiscent of prior MARINA songs like "Happy," "Solitaire," and "Immortal," and written solely by MARINA herself, it is just as introspective. The lyrics are beautifully poetic and focused on nature, something that MARINA does frequently throughout the lyrics of several songs from Froot. (The song, in fact, does sound very much like it could belong on the Froot album, but MARINA has said that the sound of the new album's first single is not indicative at all of what the overall album sounds like, which was also the case with Froot's lead single.) "I envy the birds high up in the trees," MARINA sings at the very beginning of the song (with no instrumental introduction) in her signature porcelain vocal style (which she implements especially frequently in slow ballads like this one). "They live out their lives so purposefully." Like Froot's "Immortal," the song is ethereal and atmospheric, delicate and dreamy, and MARINA actually sneakily announced the title of this song nearly a year ago when she posted a video on Twitter with "Handmade Heaven." as the caption. The video is of her looking out at a body of water (probably a lake, but I can't say for sure) underneath either a setting or rising sun, so I am thinking that the song is about finding internal peace due to external beauty found in nature, something to which I think most of us can probably relate. (I understand all too well how that particular sight, for example, can make you feel because I enjoyed a nearly identical view when I attended college at SUNY Oswego in Oswego, NY and looked out at Lake Ontario when the sun was setting or rising - it's truly a remarkable sight, and I miss it dearly!) "Handmade Heaven" has an absolutely gorgeous music video to match (which is, without a doubt, one of my favorite MARINA music videos to date), and as a diehard fan of MARINA (she is easily in my top 5 favorite musicians), I cannot wait to learn more about this era and find out what it is going to bring!