Record of The Week. 7/10/2011

Laura Marling - A Creature I Don’t Know LP (Virgin Records).




I have a confession to make; I didn’t mean to hear this album. It’s not that I don’t like Laura Marling (her debut ‘Alas, I Can Not Swim’ was magnificent); it’s simply that after reading a few positive reviews of this, her third LP, a few weeks ago it simply slipped out my mind. Two weeks of cultural isolation working my arse off in the middle of nowhere in Italy made me forget that this album was even out.

Luckily for me Emma (my flatmate and this blogs’ sometime grammatical king pin) happened to get it for her birthday and the first thing I heard when I got back home after my ‘holiday’ was Miss Laura Marling’s voice coming out of the CD player. A week later and here I am, reviewing it for you all.

Now Laura Marling is, in my opinion, a bit of an enigma. Not only has she managed to sit firmly in the folk category while still having a fair degree of mainstream success, she has also managed to survive being lumped together with that pretty dire Mumford & Sons folk movement (or whatever you want to call it) and come out of it all with a reputation. How you manage that I don’t really know. At the very least you’ve got to be able to write a good song or two.

The question is, does album number three continue that trend?

Well it starts off good. Opener ‘The Muse’ is a jazzy, laid back waltz of a song that shows that, if nothing else, Laura Marling isn’t afraid to stray from the stereotypical solo guitar and not much else you might expect from a folk singer. That being said, she does that side of things pretty dam well too. ‘Don’t Ask Me Why’ is a bare, almost Hispanic song with guitar, some stripped down percussion and a hint of violin. When she sings ‘I took the wind from the sea. I took the blood from an arrow’ half way through the song I challenge you not to feel a slight shiver at the haunting voice you’ll hear. Vocal talent and a knack of knowing when to use it is another thing not lacking on this album.

Almost seamlessly the song blurs into the next track, ‘Salanis’ that is one of the album’s best. Starting as ‘Don’t Ask Me Why’ left off it builds slowly over nearly five minutes of song with layer and layer of music being added as Marling sings ‘My mother, she’s a savour of six footed bad behaviour….will I ever see heaven again?’, this isn’t quite the same person who sang’e up and turn into my mother’ on ‘New Romantic’. Calling a record ‘mature’ is one of music journalisms dirtiest clichés and I’m not keen on using it about an album by someone barely older than me but it sort of fits. The music is more expansive, the lyrics less direct and the whole experience is more intriguing that some of her earlier work.

It isn’t all deep though. ‘My Friends’ may be slow starting but it flourishes into a euphoric belter of a song, with Fleet Foxes style backing vocals and a clattering guitar line that is uncannily like the classic Johnny Cash ‘freight train’ sound. No matter that at one point the vocal line states ‘I’m full of guilt’, it’s a song to lift you off your feet.

Then there’s ‘Sophia’, starting with the rather clumsy ‘Oh I have been wondering/Where I have been Pondering’ but ending up being a touching heartbreak number (again with those intermittent ghostly backing vocals) that has a foot stomping, almost spoken word last two minutes that pretty much screams ‘sing along moment’ the first time you hear it.





If I was to give every song on the album the attention it deserves then this review would run to pages. However there is one final track worth a special mention. Just after the halfway point of the album sits ‘Nights after Night’, a piece of music that, without a doubt, is the most impressive moment of the entire album. A dirgey Leonard Cohen-esque love song full of lines like ‘I showed you my hand once/And you hit me in fear’ and sound tracked by a murmuring guitar and nothing else; It shows how far Laura Marling has come over the three albums. She’s no longer the fresh faced folk singer of a few years ago. She’s branched out and moved on a little and, if she keeps it up at this rate, will end up being just as famous in the world of mainstream, chart obsessed music as she is in the rather smaller world of banjos and long hair.

If that does happen it can only be a good thing, because people deserve music this good far more than (yet) another Rihanna single.