Marta Del Grandi is in a liminal space between the past she always has one eye on and a future she consistently encourages herself to move towards. Her third album, Dream Life, feels like grappling with a reality check where you’ve put in the work but things don’t look the way you expected and there are untold peripheral problems beyond your control.
In the great indie pop tradition, Dream Life masks melancholia with whimsy, whether it’s fantasy land synths, syncopated programmed beats, or slide guitar. The dreamy, brooding, and vaguely foreboding synth arrangement of ‘20 Days of Summer’ touches broadly on a feeling of not being able to laugh at the chaos, as Del Grandi reminds herself “to keep going / try to breathe”.
Even her more minimal compositions have a warmth to them, and Del Grandi’s breezy soprano fluctuates easily between elation and heartbreak. The slight lilt in her voice on ‘Shoe Shaped Cloud’ that underscores the sadness in her lyrics also dances across her descriptions of fantastical images on ‘Neon Lights’.
But Del Grandi knows how to execute a big, joyous outro. Both ‘Dream Life’ and ‘Alpha Centauri’ roll in on mellow acoustic melodies that end in full-bodied crescendos, the sheer delight evident in her voice. ‘Alpha Centauri’, with its desire for a life of art and love, the satisfaction of what’s been achieved and the longing for the person who was supposed to come along for the ride, ends in a pop burst of melodic horns out of the Belle and Sebastian playbook.
She finds her perfect middle ground between moody synth arrangements and pop on ‘Antartica’, a catchy combination of gentle encouragement and eco-fatalist anxiety. Horns provide a buoyant rhythmic base for retro science fiction synths and equally clipped guitars and vocals. A point-counterpoint from the verse to the chorus has Del Grandi trading off between panic about melting ice caps and the directive, “keep on going straight / and you will be okay”. (And hey, who isn’t nostalgic for a time when they weren’t worried about the heat death of the planet?)
But her views of the past are far from all nostalgic reminiscing; Del Grandi frequently refers to their “burdens” and to things to be left behind. And for any longing for what or who has been lost, for the worries of whether she has become who she was meant to be or made her father proud, she’s still cheering herself onward. She is her own motivational coach. She could easily be yours, too.
