Like many of the musicians she grew up listening to - Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell - Laura Marling sheds her musical skin with each album she produces, emerging with a rejuvenated sense of purpose and a new direction. And this, at the age of 25, is her fifth – a fact sure to make anyone under 30 seriously question their own life choices.
The album opener, ‘Warrior’, is a spacey, reverb-filled mood-setter, with the refrain “I’m just a horse with no name” serving as a surely deliberate, darkly comic counterpoint to that ubiquitous America hit. No time to ponder on it though – the second track, ‘False Hope’, needs to know something: “Is it still OK that I don’t know how to be alone?” Much has been made of the scuzzy electric guitar riff that ripples throughout this song (the first overt use of an electric guitar in Marling’s music), but it’s the assertive desperation of her vocals that packs the biggest punch. Marling spits her consonants and howls her vowels, escalating further and further until reaching an even more brutal question, “Is it still OK that I don’t know how to be, at all?”
On ‘Feel Your Love’, Marling’s voice has transformed back to the tone she favoured in previous albums (aside from her debut that is, after which she eschewed her English-accented vocals for an ethereal Scottish/American lilt), reminding the listener of her effortlessly soaring vibrato. The influence of Marling’s time living on the West Coast of America is probably best reflected on ‘Walk Alone’, though perhaps that’s just because its use in her brilliant short film, Woman Driver, has been imprinted irrevocably onto my brain.
In a recent interview with The Guardian, Marling said, “A lot of people – my sisters in particular – are always like, ‘What is wrong with you? Why do you never contact us?’… I used to hear that a lot: ‘You are heartless.’ That’s from people who loved me.” With that in mind, and rejecting that pesky Death of the Author theory, the opening line, “I think you were wrong / You said I can’t love” is quietly devastating.
Next is ‘Strange’, which is as truly bizarre and mesmeric as its name suggests. It’s almost entirely spoken – in the aforementioned transatlantic accent – with urgent, driving guitar chords underneath. Continuing on with the themes of candid detachment, Marling speak-sings the lines, “But should you fall in love with me / your love becomes my responsibility / and I can never do you wrong. / Do you know how hard that is?” It’s a sentiment rarely touched upon in music, which is all-too-often confined to grand sweeping declarations of love, rather than this different, less palatable sort of love - tentative, self-serving.
Listen to 'Short Movie' below
On ‘Don’t Let Me Bring You Down’, the guitar riff from ‘False Hope’ is back – a technique she used on the four opening tracks of ‘Once I Was An Eagle’. Unfortunately it doesn’t quite have the drive of ‘False Hope’, and actively reminding us of that track only entrenches its relative inferiority. Still, the line, “Do I look like I’m fucking around?” sums up the album pretty well.
‘Gurdjieff’s Daughter’ is the only track to rival the strangeness of ‘Strange’. It’s inspired by an odd encounter between film director Chilean filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky and the daughter of spiritual teacher George Gurdjieff, but you don’t need to get bogged down in Marling’s alarming cultural intellect to appreciate it – it’s intoxicating on a gut level. When she performs it live, she throws her head back and sticks out her tongue as if possessed by its eccentricity.
No doubt on her next album, Marling will once again shed her skin and continue forwards towards a new incarnation. But, given the beauty and brutality of Short Movie, one hopes she’ll stick with this skin for a little while. “Do I look like I’m fucking around?” The answer to that, of course, is a resounding no.
