Laura Marling & Alessi’s Ark - Webster Hall, New York – 28/9/11
4/5
Webster Hall on Wednesday night felt like home. At long, long last I belonged (cue violins). And this was not, as one might expect, down to the disproportionate number of fellow-“Brits”, as they say here, in the audience. The fellow-country(wo)men were nice - more than nice - but what I am referring to is something of a more chemical order... Peroxide. It was everywhere. Which, tragically, is not something that can be said about very many places in New York: I get stopped once a day here by people who want to know why I have “grandma hair.” I usually refer them to Laura Marling.
And oh, how magnificent she was... Inspirational from (snowy white) head to toe. Glowing with confidence, she walked briskly onstage and dove straight into a breathtaking rendition of ‘Rambling Man’. No introductions required. Her audience was spellbound from the start, in that calm, cross-armed, ‘was-that-a-pin-dropping?’ way symptomatic of the very best of acoustic folk gigs.
Not that this was exclusively an acoustic folk gig: some of it ventured into territory that could only be classified as, well, country. Country territory. Several of the tracks from Marling’s latest album, A Creature I Don’t Know, escalated into proper hoedowns; and final song ‘All My Rage’ had the crowd whooping/clapping/dancing their tranquil folksy shoes off by the end of the first verse.
The atmosphere reminded me of the early Bosun’s Locker days (yeah, I was there, no big deal) when a too-young-to-drink Marling used to play alongside the offensive-but-infectious Captain Kick and the Cowboy Ramblers... Those guys could really get a room stomping. Except now, of course, it is Marling who is doing the rabble-rousing; and she is proving to be pretty good at it, too. But I must admit that I prefer her music a little less banjo-laden.
When it came down to it, the evening’s stand-out tracks were all from her more-folk-than-country first and second albums: ‘Alpha Shallows’, ‘Ghosts’, ‘Blackberry Stone’ et al; and of course the heart-stopping ‘Goodbye, England (Covered In Snow)’, which left us all in a state of Total Speechlessness and Awe. I do not exaggerate - you really could have heard a pin drop, more-than-metaphorically, as she it sang alone on that otherwise empty stage, the raw emotion in the lyrics catching at her jolie-laide voice. A hard song to follow, inevitably, but brand new, as-yet-unreleased track ‘Pray For Me’ more than held its own... Keep a beady ear out for it at Marling’s current live shows. Interestingly, she claims here that she “permanently etched my name right into your soul”, whereas in ‘Goodbye, England’ she merely “wrote my name in your book”. Her name is going to be bloody everywhere if she keeps this up; not to mention that her tools seem to be getting sharper. Watch out, world.
This review would not be complete without more-than-a-mention of Alessi’s Ark, a.k.a. singer-songwriter Alessi Laurent-Marke (plus boyfriend Marcus, on guitar), who supported Marling on her American tour. Charming and rather magical-looking in her clogs and long, patterned dress, she wove folk-tinged guitar lines around whimsical lyrics, but managed to retain a rounded groundedness in the vocals that made her musical fairytales feel real.
Though only twenty-one (a few months younger than Marling) Laurent-Marke has an impressive back-catalogue of releases, all of which are worthy of attention - especially the wonderfully wise and feminine ‘Hummingbird’, from the Friend Ships EP she split with the band Thunder Power. The real stand-out tracks, though - ‘Wire’ and ‘Time Travel’ - were relatively recent; and live, as on record, they had a depth and a darkness that was occasionally lacking in her earlier work... Powerful, resonant stuff.
- Photos by Maximillian Webster
Artists in this article: Laura Marling, Alessi's Ark
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