“I’m just a horse with no name,” sings Laura Marling on Short Movie’s opening song, Warrior. It references the band America, while the music embraces rustic Americana and spaced-out British folk. This is the most American-sounding of the 25-year-old Brit’s albums, and its sense of place – whether exploring the Joshua Tree area or being stifled by LA life – follows a soul-searching period for the singer.
After setting the bar high with the hour-long break-up album Once I Was An Eagle, Marling scrapped an album’s worth of material and tackled an unsettling period by trying to demystify the writing and producing process. The result, her first self-produced effort, is looser and more exploratory than Marling’s previous work. Marling opens up about urban claustrophobia on the exhilarating False Hope, asking, “Is it still okay that I don’t know how to be at all?”. She sings of the woman downstairs losing her mind, the fear of becoming her is an unsettling thought in her insomniac state. The emptiness and isolation of LA is neatly summed up by the lyric “You’re not somebody until somebody knows your name.”
The uncertainty of the lyrics contrast with the confident, upfront vocal delivery and the detailed, but are uncluttered by production. Marling is playful with her vocal delivery, matching music with a range of styles, from brooding crooning to beat-like vocal rhythms. The American feel bleeds through in the music, as a heavier dependence on electric guitar and the odd nod to Dire Straits vies with acoustic folk and formal structures. It makes for a rich and finely tuned distillation of a restless, rootless soul.
BY CHRIS GIRDLER
