Album Reviews

Album Review: Laura Marling – I Speak Because I Can (EMI/Virgin)

By | Published on Tuesday 16 March 2010

Laura Marling

Well, she’s done it again. Following on from her debut, ‘Alas, I Cannot Swim’, in 2008, Laura Marling returns with another collection of wonderful folk songs with enough hooks and melodies to ensure that after a couple of listens all of these tunes will become like old friends.

From the opening ‘Devil’s Spoke’, with its driving rhythm and end coda of “eye to eye, nose to nose, ripping of each other’s clothes, in a most peculiar way”, to the end of ‘I Speak Because I Can’, with its call “to anyone I trust enough to listen”, the album is much more grown up than her debut, even though she is still only 20.

There is melancholy and a sense that some of these songs were influenced by her break up with Noah And The Whale main man Charlie Fink, though this album isn’t quite as dedicated to that theme as ‘The First Days Of Spring’ (NATW’s second album) was. Rambling Man’s “It’s hard to accept yourself as someone you don’t desire / As someone you don’t want to be”, powered by a backing band consisting of members of NATW, as well as Mumford & Sons, shows a faltering sense of identity in the wake of events. While the line in ‘Alpha Shallows’, “I want to be held by those arms”, suggests regret, it doesn’t overall sound like she would change anything that has happened.

At the heart of the album is the poetical ‘Goodbye England (Covered In Snow)’, a beautiful, yearning vocal that takes the song through “I tried to be a girl that likes to be used, I’m too good for that, there’s a mind beneath this hat” to the “we will keep you” refrain that reminded me of the mice from ‘Bagpuss’ in a surprisingly good way.

It’s a welcome addition to the pop-folk genre and with Marling back in the studio next month to record her next album, which is pencilled in for a September release, we can expect a lot more where this came from. IM

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