Mariam The Believer - Love Everything

Mariam Wallentin (aka Mariam the Believer) is a deep, honey voiced artist from Sweden who uses the moniker to release pop music.  Drenched with strings, melody and foreboding this second effort is a carefully constructed pop album that swoons and sways in equal parts, sometimes when you don’t expect it to either.  Songs can plod and then gallop without warning and it’s a mature album full of promise.

The centrepiece of the album is Eternity, a slow building number where the vocal is delivered in a deliciously deep timbre before setting itself free with a chorus that moves the pace up several notches and then moves into an almost hip-hop ending that ends with her delivering a mantra of ‘Living, loving, moving, hoping, trying, crying, fighting, growing, staying doubting, feeling, knowing, singing, playing, dying, floating’ repeatedly in a triumphant fashion.  Bodylife could almost be a Little Dragon number with its beautiful chorus.  However, there is something in the verses which broods and becomes something else entirely.  Closing number, Crust, is a piano led affair that sounds like Tori Amos with a backing band.  There are influences everywhere here but at the core is a dark vocal performance which hits all over the vocal range and never sounds like showing off, a blessed thing.  The most frustrating thing for some though will be the repeated tendency to change a song midway through.  Power ballads become something else and slower numbers suddenly start auditioning for their dancehall filler spots.  It’s on repeated listening that this becomes as endearing as many of the other aspects of this album.  Multi-phased pop songs are few and far between and here we have an album full of them and emboldened by its use of piano, strings and horns to deliver something that, whilst it sounds like a lot of other things, is a piece of its own.

Love Everything the title cries and you’ll be hard pressed to do that on such an eclectic offering.  However, there is so much richness on offer it's impossible not to love this album and let it feel those dark winter nights with its warmth and brooding ambiance.