Review Summary: Mature third album from exquisite indie-folk songstress.
It’s so often the case these days that a singer-songwriter arrives on the scene, produces a well received debut, is touted as the next best thing, and disappears without trace, bedridden with a nasty case of second (or even third) album syndrome. Whatever happened to Badly Drawn Boy after he did the About a Boy soundtrack? Damien Rice, anyone? Ed Sheeran may go the same way, but let’s hope not. Anyway, Laura Marling has shown with her latest release that she will never be in danger of falling into this trap - A Creature I Don’t Know is the third in a string of three consistently brilliant albums that retains a little of the heartfelt introspection that shot her to fame in 2007, and branches out even further into the realms of country and blues.
With ‘Ghosts’, the first track off her debut album ‘Alas I Cannot Swim’, Marling introduced a sensitive, quietly spoken brand of folk-pop that possessed a kind of knowing naivety. Seemingly every vocal line on the album tailed off with a hush-hush brevity that emphasized the sincerity and invention of the lyrics. On her latest effort, however, Marling has moved beyond this phase into a new field of maturity, and she is not afraid to let her influences show. All throughout the album are shades of Joni Mitchell, Kate Bush, Neil Young and Robert Plant.
The opener, ‘The Muse’ introduces a new forthright and American-style Marling in a husky blues, the vocals dipping into a conversational style that resurfaces throughout the album. The Joni Mitchell-style ‘Don’t Ask Me’ segues deftly into the album’s centrepiece, ‘Salinas’, a perfect fusion of folk, blues and country that evokes Dylan and PJ Harvey, and builds into a stirring final crescendo, with full band. Similar is ‘The Beast’, where a more sinister, earthy side of Marling emerges. ‘I suggest you be grateful there’s no blood on my hands’, she sings - here is a songwriter who has emerged from tentative beginnings and can now hold her own alongside her influences, of which Neil Young is clearly one on this track. Following this, ‘Night after Night’ comes almost as an antidote to the previous bombast, a strikingly dark, stripped-down ballad about fading love that employs a stunning melody, and embodies precise and beautiful songcraft.
With A Creature I Don’t Know, Marling has somewhat transcended the indie-folk genre she was originally born out of, leaving Mumford and Sons, to name just one fellow act, far behind. With a maturity of songcraft seldom seen in a songwriter in their early twenties, she has further cemented her position in a tradition of quality female folk-pop songwriters going back to Joni Mitchell and Laura Nyro in the 70s. Long may it continue.
