Mariel Darling “No Mirrors”
URL: https://marieldarling.com/
As much as we all try to get along with each other to the best of our abilities, sometimes we meet people in life that we’re just destined to never agree with. A lot of people will try and sell you the notion that there’s something wrong with that, that we’re inherently all supposed to be best friends and that there’s something wrong with us if we meet people that are our complete polar opposite. To put it mildly, I don’t agree. It’s okay if we don’t agree or get along, because part of the diversity of life means meeting a lot of people who are absolutely nothing like you. Music is where I make a single exception to my concept, because music, as we all know, has the ability to bring people together who would otherwise loath each other from the cradle to the grave. Music is an underutilized tool that could probably end every war that’s raging on this planet and mend every broken fence between neighbors. Mariel Darling understands both the former and latter statements to be true, and in essence she’s saying as much in her new single “No Mirrors.”
Darling is a modern artist with a very modern sound, but like a lot of her generation she cares about the greater impact of her actions and the good in the world around her. Her music is a commentary about love, life and acceptance, and in “No Mirrors” she takes a bold plunge into melodic electronica and reemerges as its reigning queen. I half expected “No Mirrors” to be a club song when I first played it, as a lot of my colleagues in music journalism have been remarking about her wispy but relentless electronic tinge. I couldn’t have been further off track though, and during my second and third listens of the song I even started to reassess an earlier critique I had made about electronica and its current role in pop music. There’s something to be said about a young songwriter who gets your brain going all over the place with a modest, four minute pop song.
“No Mirrors” is an excellent way for me to meet Mariel Darling, but in her next single I think I want her to spread her tone out a little more and really dig into her identity as a songwriter. There’s a couple glimpses of pain in “No Mirrors” that felt particularly stirring; as a listener I want to know where that comes from and why she wants to share it. I also caught on to her dry wit, which is evidenced only slightly in her lyrical prose but is hard to miss when taking a closer look at the music. It would be quite interesting to see her make that wit the feature of a song or the theme of an entire album. Any way you look at it, Mariel Darling’s got a very exciting career ahead of her, and I’m sure I won’t be the only critic keeping a close eye on her next developments.
AMAZON: https://www.amazon.com/No-Mirrors/dp/B07G5RD5FG
Mindy McCall
