Album review: Laura Marling: A Creature

IT WAS evident from the first wisp of her debut album, Alas, I Cannot Swim, that Laura Marling was an enigmatic creature, proudly separate from most singers of her age in her rising star situation.

The point was brought crashing home at this year’s Brit Awards shindig, when she was uncharitably booed by kids in the audience who had never heard of her and were therefore clueless as to why the Best Female Artist award would go to this plainly attired interloper and not to their favourite dress-up doll, Cheryl Cole.

In keeping with Marling’s career to date, her victory over the nouveau nation’s sweetheart was a quiet triumph to be enjoyed, then filed away before pressing on to the next goal.

Like her forebears Kate Bush and PJ Harvey – company she deserves to be considered alongside – this self- contained and hugely assured songwriter keeps her own counsel, inhabits her own musical world and gives the impression that she doesn’t much care what anyone else makes of it.

This impression is only advanced by A Creature I Don’t Know, which marks another at least partial advance into new territory following her breakthrough album I Speak Because I Can.

Speaking to The Scotsman last week, she referred to the songs written and then discarded in its wake as “old clothes” and it is quite noticeable that she has partly shed the ethereal Englishness of her previous albums – and, with it, the musical kinship to her less sophisticated contemporaries Mumford & Sons and Noah and the Whale – to investigate the red dust of the Americas.

This time around, Marling is aiming for a toughness in her songwriting – what she terms a “stern femininity”. To achieve this, she all but abandons the shiver factor of the first two albums. There is also a strain of perversity in her composition – she deliberately wrote the entire album in a tricky guitar tuning. No wonder those old clothes don’t fit anymore.

She wastes no time in demonstrating how far she has come on opening track The Muse, a country jazz shuffle unlike anything she has written before, couched in strains of swirling cello, jazz piano and pedal steel guitar, which marks the first mention of the kind of creature we might be dealing with here: “I’m nothing but the beast and I’ll call on you when I need to feast”.

This beastly presence makes itself felt on a couple of other tracks. There are threats and comforts to be found on Salinas (“where the women go forever”), an evocative, mellifluous roots rocker which builds to a cinemascopic finish, while a track called The Beast is a gathering storm of an album centrepiece in which she evokes the tradition of folkloric bogeymen to explore the idea of man’s dual nature.

Mind, she sounds quite certain of which way to jump when she sings “tonight I choose the beast, tonight he lies with me”. Definitely not so ethereal now.

I Was Just A Card has a classy adult pop feel with its Bacharachian horn intro and Marling’s smooth, mature delivery.

This is the closest she has yet come to pop classicism, but the folky singer/songwriter tradition is still what is in her blood and is expressed most keenly on the rich, rousing, bluegrass-tinged folk shanty All My Rage.

Don’t Ask Me Why, an elegant acoustic waltz on guitar and strings, is about as direct as Marling songs come, with an empathetic chorus of “those of us who are lost and low, I know how you feel, it’s not right but it’s real”.

My Friends is musically light and luminous but lyrically burdened with longing.

A more contented, though still intense, domestic portrait emerges on Rest In The Bed. But it wouldn’t be a Laura Marling song without a hint of dark ambivalence as she anticipates the threat posed when “the sirens come”. Right on cue, a chorus of cooing backing vocals swoops over the song.

The influence of her musical hero Joni Mitchell looms over her fluent vocal stylings.

Marling doesn’t leap around the registers as much as Mitchell but does use the rise and fall of her pitch to almost conversational effect on the freewheeling country rock-influenced single Sophia, where she also reprises the siren chorus.

But it is Mitchell’s countryman and colleague Leonard Cohen who is invoked on the intimate strains of Night After Night, informing everything from its lyrical picking to the sombre romanticism of the lyrics, Marling’s low-key delivery and the elegant course of the melody.

Lovely though it is, it is the one time on the album when Marling falls meekly into step behind a musical mentor. Elsewhere, she is a creature who most surely does know where she is going.