No discussion of Marling is complete without some reference to her precocity, but here she asks of a lover: "Would you watch my body weaken/ My mind drift away," imagining an infirm life at the age of 21.īy the end, what have we learned about Marling? That her "love is driven by rage", and that, by the final track, "All My Rage", she is prepared to let that rage go. She does a mean Leonard Cohen impression, too, on the accomplished "Night After Night". It's compelling to hear this slight and pale Englishwoman play at Dylan. "Where I've been lately is no concern of yours," sneers Marling, making like Dylan. "Sophia" gets her own song later, a cathartic southern rock shakedown. On "The Beast", Marling summons "the goddess of power", Sophia. Later, "The Beast" provides a mighty, brooding centrepiece to the album. That unnamed beast makes its first dark appearance in track one, "The Muse" ("I'm nothing but a beast/ And I call you when I need to feast"). One of the great nerdy satisfactions of A Creature I Don't Know is how crisscrossed it is with internal references. Mainly, though, she's warning people not to pry: "Don't ask me why and I'll tell you no lies." "Those of us who are lost and low/ I know how you feel/ I know it's not right/ But it's real," Marling offers, with uncharacteristic sympathy. Creature's most user-friendly ballad, "Don't Ask Me Why", comes within air-kissing distance of what people are supposed to want from a female singer-songwriter. Marling really hits her stride three tracks in. "I showed you my hand once/ And you hit me in fear," she notes at one point. Where before her songs were wintry and closed, "Salinas" is loose and sprawling. Album number three doesn't get us any closer to an unguarded emotion but it does find this buttoned-up artist inhabiting her craft with ever-greater aplomb. If Marling has appeared distant – frustratingly so at times – her actual songs give off more heat than her uptight persona suggests. Rather, she has cleaved closer to the Bob Dylan "keep 'em guessing" axis, while vocally channelling the high priestess of acoustic ice, Joni Mitchell. It's because, despite her role as the handmaiden of the recent British folk-pop revival, Marling has never bared all in the role of a confessional singer-songwriter. Despite knocking out a pair of albums by the age of 20, embarking upon relationships with two other folk singers – that's Charlie Fink and Marcus Mumford – and having endured an entire record written about one of those break-ups – that's Noah and the Whale's The First Days Of Spring – Marling has always seemed tantalisingly inscrutable. Could the title of Laura Marling's third album refer to the singer herself? She is, after all, a creature we still don't really know.
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