Laura Marling A Creature I Dont Know (EMI)
5/5
By: Hayley Leaver
Think back to your seventeenth year – if you can remember – it probably involved a great deal of questionable fashion choices and squirming social awkwardness. For one silver-mopped singer, the fashion choices didn’t seem to be an issue and social skills left her with a depressingly impressive songwriting prowess; that is, of course, Laura Marling.
Her third album comes at the tender age of twenty-one – eighteen months after sophomore album, I Speak Because I Can – and her third album with a six syllable title, but as far as repetition goes, it all stops there.
A Creature I Don’t Know differs starkly in that Marling worked out all of the vocal arrangements and writing alone, before playing to her band and producer. Ethan Johns is once again present for this LP, but there’s a clear reflection of her mounting confidence, simmering constantly throughout an album that is darker and even more evocative than anything we’ve heard from her before.
‘The Muse’ shows Marling’s voice at its most agile, with a pounding Carole King-esque piano riff for company and an undeniably country twang. It’s yet another staggering album opening – just look at ‘Devil’s Spoke’ and ‘Ghosts’; this is a girl who knows how to hook your attention.
‘I Was Just A Card’ and ‘Don’t Ask Me Why’ – the latter a stand-out live track from this summer’s performances – bare at its best the overwhelmingly lamenting voice hidden within Marling’s waiflike appearance.
One of the album’s attentions centres on Nobel Prize-winning author John Steinbeck, or more precisely his wife, Elaine, who is the ‘saviour of six-foot bad behaviour’ depicted in ‘Salinas’. It’s in these ‘procrastinations’ that Marling brews her ideas – her songwriting apparently far from autobiographical, creating a form of escapism so shadowy and earnest.
However, it’s middle track ‘The Beast’ that proves the shortness of Marling’s fuse – a climax of the indomitable sense of desire and longing that proves how well-deserved is the critical acclaim that is never too far away from anything the singer does.
A Creature I Don’t Know is every bit the haunting determination that has powered her previous albums to success with added eloquence; a pitch-perfect testament to the fact that Laura Marling is one of the best artists to emerge from the last few years of British music.
Laura Marling - Sophia by ListenBeforeYouBuy
Artists in this article: Laura Marling
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