Laura Marling: I Speak Because I Can, CD review

By Helen Brown 531PM GMT eighteen March 2010

The Hampshire Joni Mitchell burning folk thespian Laura Marling

Laura Marling

I Speak Because I Can

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Pale faced and precociously talented, Laura Marling was only eighteen when her 2008 entrance album, Alas I Cannot Swim, was nominated for the Mercury Prize. Her positive Hampshire vernacular vocals, "unnervingly grown-up" lyrics and deftndefinite acoustic guitar picking saw her compared with the immature Joni Mitchell. Staring smart rebuttal from at the behind of her blunt-cut, peroxide-blonde fringe, she positively seemed to be firewood a identical glow of delicate autonomy inside of the rather boysy "nu-folk" stage (which includes Devendra Banhart, James Yorkston and Mumford & Sons). The weight of vicious expectancy hung complicated as old velvet fate over her second manuscript but it sounds similar to shes only thrown them far-reaching and left pelting out in to the English panorama to emanate this ardent method of songs expressing all the wildness and knowledge of a twenty year-old "feeling the weight of womanhood".

The new Marling is darker and some-more sophisticated. She opens record with a drunken, midnight maypole dance of a song. Devils Spoke builds from a murky mural of rural lonesomeness in to an increasingly frenzied, banjo-spun intrigue finale with lovers "eye to eye, nose to nose/ripping off each others garments in a majority rare way". Whereas so most song entrance from the "nu-folk" stage sounds similar to inlet recollected in safety, by the intense glow of a little Olde Taverne, Marlings sounds starkly unprotected to the English elements. Her songs are elementary nonetheless complex, uncanny but quotidien similar to hedgerows twisted, full of thorns, fruit, hold up and death. You can listen to a disturb at the force as well as the benevolence of the landscape in the steadfast alto that sings "Ill never love England some-more than when lonesome in snow."

Many of the songs onslaught with Marlings conflicted emotional for both normal monogamy and unobstructed independence. "I attempted to be a lady who likes to be used," she sings on Goodbye England, "Im as well great for that/ Theres a mind underneath this hat." Elsewhere she gazes behind in to Greek mythology for womanlike companionship, addressing the matrimony enchantress Hera and conjuring the suggestion of Odysseus studious mother Penelope. I Speak Because I Can is my prime recover of the year so far and positively an manuscript value sailing home for.

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