Yahoo! Music Album Review

Released on 11/02/08
Label: Virgin

Poor Laura Marling must long to be a little bit past it, if only so she can be free of the millstone of her own precocity. For there's nothing the media loves more than a prodigy, especially a weirdo one. But rather than the forced, fetishised "maturity" of Amy MacDonald or (shudder) Joss Stone, their artificially deep vocals the aural equivalent of a child strutting "Bambi"-esque in her mother's high heels, Marling, with her bookish small-town background and resolutely un-made-up face, seems a true, Kate Bush-ish one-off.

Her strikingly beautiful but unaffected voice has those same slightly jazzy, dark folk tones currently being employed by the likes of Florence & The Machine and Peggy Sue & The Pirates. The masterfully controlled vibrato on the "Wuthering Heights"-referencing "Tap At My Window" even recalls Joni Mitchell or Sandy Denny. Recent single "Ghosts", an "Amelie"-ish tale of misfits stumbling into love with a rousing, hymnal chorus is simply lovely. Deftly simple lines like "Lover please, don't fall to your knees / It's not like I believe in everlasting love", would be powerful stuff from someone in their late 20s, even 30s, let alone teens.

Although lines such as "I'm trying to f*ck up my own life" might sound teen-fuelled, it shouldn't be assumed Marling is always writing in a 17-year-old's voice. As "Ghosts And The Captain & The Hour Glass" prove, she's a skilful craftswoman of narratives and characters, already enough of an artist to have something more interesting to write about than herself. "Night Terror", for example, finds her side-stepping twee "my lover with the coal-black hair" folky medievalisms for a menacing fiddle and surreal visions of waking up on a bench in Shepherd's Bush.

Like kindred spirit Jeremy Warmsley, she blends a sense of timelessness with real (admittedly very middle class), UK teenage life. Even when she does dabble in pure folk, as on the bluegrassy hidden track that gives the album its title, the effect is still charming. Of course, a teen making a perfect album would be too terrifying to exist in nature; "Failure", while not quite that, is an unremarkable finger-picking folkie answer to Avril Lavigne's "Sk8r Boi", and "You're No God" with its skiffle-folk beat and cutesy glockenspiel is workaday, with a veneered Radio 2 production that compares badly to the darker, sparer moments like "Old Stone".

Nonetheless, the spell Marling casts in harder, purer tracks such as "My Manic & I" and the misleadingly gorgeous tale of death by domestic violence of "Dora (Your Only Doll)" are hard to resist. White-haired, skulking spook-child though she might be, Laura Marling is no freak of the week.

    by Emily Mackay