Laura Marling - I Speak Because I Can

So the first album didn't generate much discussion here but it really crept up on me at the start of last year. I listened to the new one on the way into work and it sounds great, darker and angrier but the second half is uniformly fantastic.

I sort of resent her being lumped in with a lot of these ropey student folk bands that are knocking around at the moment, because this really doesn't feel like the work of a teenager at all. Anyway, talk amongst yourselves.

yeah, been listening to this a lot this weekend - it's kind of a revelation, really, in that it marks laura marling out as a pretty singular talent - i loved the debut, but it was almost as if it had happened accidentally, like she'd just been singing and composing these songs in her bedroom and they just happened to be really good. here, it seems consciously both ambitious and a progression from the simplicity of the debut - she's singing with a real grit and authority now.

this is the single, "devil's spoke" (which we covered on the jukebox too) -

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QirL0HXnyS4

and this is the song that's grabbed me most so far, "alpha shallows" -

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LsO6SQAzZxI

also, this song came out on a between-album EP, and it's more in the style of the first album, but it's really awesome if you missed it -

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zNxar07_9YA

No Hope In The Air was the one that really stuck out for me on first listen.

Wow. Alpha Shadows is pretty amazing.

Pretty much not my kind of thing, but I've been impressed with it. I wish I heard less obvious echo of Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, and Joni Mitchell (but maybe that's just me not being into the overall genre much to begin with). But I think I also hear something of her own and I like some of the twists the music takes.

She does sing with authority and she does sound mature beyond her years. I find the interviews interesting when she talks about being exposed in the media in the past and essentially learning how to set up boundaries. She seems to have well-developed defenses at this point, as though she instantly learned her lesson and has come out of it with exactly the toughness she needs to deal with all of that.

(but maybe that's just me not being into the overall genre much to begin with

Also, I admit my naming those names may just indicate my general ignorance of the folk traditions this is rooted in. I may just be hearing the genre, or there may be more appropriate comparisons to make to less well known singers.)

Yeah it doesn't really remind me of any of them, she actually reminds me of Will Oldham more than anyone else. If Will Oldham could be bothered to put his back into it a bit.

this album kind of took me by surprise. i got it on a whim based on someone talking it up in the female singer-songwriters thread and have probably listened to it more than anything else in the time since. devil's spoke and goodbye england are both pretty wonderful.

I'll echo all the praise here. I usually like my singer songwriters to have a bit of a twist to their sound and straight 'folk' doesn't usually engage me. But this feels very folky (in the sense of the guitar tunings/pickings and the arrangements) but at the same time utterly compelling.

Her voice really reminds me of someone but I can't quite put my finger on who. There's a bit of Joni Mitchell there when she sings in the higher register, but that's not often and it's not Joni who I'm thinking of. This will nag me all week, I suspect.

I have spoken about it elsewhere but it is excellent and I'm pleased to see the critical acclaim coming round to think of much of her as much as I do.

Her voice really reminds me of someone but I can't quite put my finger on who.

I know what you mean, it's been niggling at me the past couple of days as I've played the record. Her voice, especially on Devil's Spoke, is strongly reminiscent of someone, but I can't place who. Though I would say that elsewhere there's something of the Nick Drake to her voice as well. Just to throw another folky onto the ever-growing pile.

Liking the hell out of this album though. I thought the 'Alas' LP was nice enough, but didn't really grab me, and I wasn't expecting too much with this new one but it might be my favourite of the year so far, over even Joanna Newsom.

Devil's Spoke is a lot like the theme to Deadwood, I reckon.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B909njPoX7k

i really like this.

she was really, really good live the other night, too. a pleasing tinge of pj harvey on her lower, more intense notes

which is not something i imagined i'd be saying about laura marling two years ago

listened to a bunch of her on youtube

def have to say: the less trad singer-songwriter relationship stuff and the more dark and witchy i gets, the better (for me)

Yeah it doesn't really remind me of any of them, she actually reminds me of Will Oldham more than anyone else. If Will Oldham could be bothered to put his back into it a bit.

― Matt DC, Monday, March 22, 2010 6:11 PM (3 days ago) Bookmark

i hear that connection a lot more than the others mentioned too.

also, for the promo of her first album she was often citing him as an influence.

Okay, so I've just ordered some tickets for her show at the Alexander theatre in Brum next month. She must be doing something right then, as I don't often go to gigs anymore, let alone ones where I'll be seated in the dress circle, and not crushing plastic lager beakers underfoot, trying to elbow some room in the crowd in front of a stage.

fucking wish i could've seen her at a seated gig from the dress circle, she was amazing live the other night but that was the first time i'd set foot in the london barfly and just UGH UGH UGH GRIMNESS - the sauna-like temperature, the sardine-packed crowd, the rude indie kids, so intolerable

I got yr tweets from the Barfly and have to say that the mental image was simply hilarious, Lex.

You kind of realise a lot of what's wrong with British "indie" when you see this place that's supposed to be the pinacle of Britindie and "legendary" and it's just such a horrible space.

"Witchy" is a problematic word, but I kinda understand what you're getting at. That she manages to capture a certain otherness in a way that displays strength without descending into that kind of (ugh) etherial girl nonsense.

Isn't that like every 'legendary' venue (100 club, CBGB's, etc) that in reality is a 'horrible space'?

Barfly is no longer UK indie capital at all: it gets very few notable gigs now. The centre of indie gravity has moved east.

I hate this having never heard it, purely on the strength of the giant billboard for it on Broadway Market which looks like some kind of retro perfume ad.

btw that's a great, insightful review, mitchell - enjoyed reading it

I've been listening to this one all day:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rt1dmt-Zqyc

Went to the Alexandra theatre concert last night. I thought the theatre setting would be something I would enjoy, but it kind of got in the way for me. I wanted to be in the thick of a crowd in front of the stage, not sat up in the dress circle, forced to be next to a canoodling couple who were only interested in each other. That put a slight dampener on things but, damn, Laura was spellbinding. Completely bowled over by this girl and her music atm tbh.

Might go and see her show at the Hay Festival, another slightly odd setting I suppose.

Didn't realize we had a thread for this. Saw her before the new album came out at Le Poisson Rouge and she was great. Let me echo everyone saying that the new album is great.

she is good. amazing voice.

2 surprising facts:
1.she is only 20.
2.she's from england.

makes ger record even better.

Digging her cover of The Needle And The Damage Done. Sounds exactly like you expect it to, but so so good.

her cover of "blues run the game," on the other side of that 7", is also superb.

i think i was expecting something poppier & more wistful like aimee mann on 'ghost world' but this record is p authorial and distanced... covering neil young feels a lot more appropriate than i wouldve guessed

Her taste in boyfriends puts me off but not enough to think the last record is anything other than beautiful and wonderful.

sadly used to my favourite female artists having THE WORST taste in men.

http://i153.photobucket.com/albums/s236/mezxspectrum/marlingmailer-1.jpg

http://images2.playserver1.com/ProductImages/0/6/3/5/7/4/0/2/20475360_300x300_1.jpg

oh shit exciting!!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mvd_tvffGbc&feature=player_embedded#at=46

aww, she's blonde again.

nagl

why is her music so horrible

I don't mind her, but I'm sure Charlie Fink, the singer of Noah And The Whale, is responsible for at least some of her alleged horridness....

Saw her in Edinburgh opening fro Daniel Johnston, she said "You know, I think I'm going to live here some day" and loads of posh girls made a gurgling noise.

YOW

http://pitchfork.com/forkcast/16104-sophia/

yeuch

Third album already? Blimey, this is a pleasant surprise.

It's a cracker, too.

She's playing a series of gigs in cathedrals in the autumn.

Oh, that song took off rather expectedly and in a rather lovely direction. This will be good.

She was amazing at Glastobury, such total command of the stage and her material while barely moving.

The thing is, that track I posted (Ghosts) I initially thought it was really quite simple and very pop - a covers band I was playing with at the time did a version of it, and the musical backing part of it was really simple and easily arranged, it was just two chords, really - until we tried to put the vocals over the top and I was just completely impressed by how she strung the quite complex vocal line around this very simple very pop background. It had this trick of being both very catchy and immediately accessible, yet it did take several attempts to get all of the little quirks of the melody. Just the right amount of utter direct pop simplicity with some quite unexpected turns that took a couple of times to fully work out. I was impressed. Especially considering she was a teenager when she wrote it.

Kat3, I apologize for having called you the b word - there's no excuse for that. Sorry.

what female singer-songwriters do you like crut?

to name a few off the top of my head, early madonna, carole king, janis ian, kate bush, I like tori amos's voice but I haven't listened to enough of her songs to judge... I guess I don't really listen to a lot of "singer-songwriters," male or female, compared to the amount of music I listen to that is by several people collaborating together or performing a song someone else has written or performing a song that they have written/composed but that does not involve any singing

or like, female singers i guess.

a ton!!

oh and of course V1RGO NO1R

From my limited perspective on folkie singer-sonwriters, to me she splits the difference between Norah Jones and Ani DiFranco.

LOL my idea of hell

I can't believe there are 100+ comments worth of argument to be had about Laura Marling.

I bought the titular album of this thread IN A SUPERMARKET and I love it. So does my wife.

The problem in the discourse of the last 24 hours on this thread as I see it is that Turangalila is persistently using very emotive and subjective terms ("horrible") in pseudo-objective sentences ("this music is horrible" not "I find this music horrible"), the impact of which is made to feel snide and dismissive towards people who do like this music by the brevity and offhandedness of the delivery. So, people are happily discussing the artist, and apropos nothing, "this is horrible", which then feels like "and you are stupid for being duped by the horribleness" when dismissive talk of marketing comes in, too. It's very difficult to react to that with anything beyond aggression, because it's basically old fashioned trolling, and the fact that Kate, Matt, lex, and Owen didn't just collectively yell "fuck off" is pretty commendable. Anyway, I love her last record, her voice, her melodies, her dramatic, powerful climaxes which feel very strong and unexpected to me, and I also love the non-traditional, non-folk touches to the production, which bring something new to the table for me. I have little interest in authentic, old folk. It sounds stuffy and old and alien to me. Laura M feels passionate and alive and modern, and speaks to me.

"This music is horrible" and "I find this music horrible" are synonymous in meaning and I'm surprised anyone would stick up for the idea of covering all opinions on a board basically about musical opinions in IMO IMO IMO IMO IMO IMO IMO IMO IMO IMO IMO. I'm pretty certain that the fact that the opinion is coming from someone who is not you covers "in my opinion" or "I find this to be ___" adequately and has done so pretty well for the past ten years on ILM. To be honest, I don't even understand what happened on this thread or how it turned into an argument when such flip or joking dismissals are pretty par for the course elsewhere on ILM.

Laura Marling's music is horrible, by the by.*

I find it to be so.

i don't think the detractors itt are down on her because they perceive her to be not "authentic"

Like my immediate reaction to something I dislike is always going to be "this is horrible" in a way that is not meant to be dismissive of other opinions. It's just my reaction. I don't think you need me to say that it's my opinion or my reaction to know that it is mine and mine alone. x-post

I totally agree, Melissa, that in theory we all "know" that posts by other people are, by the very fact that they come from other people, always subjective opinion, but it's disingenuous to dismiss the emotive impact a specific phrase like "why is her music so horrible" or "this music is horrible" dropped into a specific kind of discussion can have. We know it's only opinion at a high level of cognition but at an emotional level it pisses you off, and to ignore that pissing off is to ignore the subtleties of language and how people respond emotionally to discourse.

On an emotional gut level, it pisses me off in general when people don't like what I like, "IMO" or not, and I think even an opinion that is actually phrased as one can still read as dismissive either because of its context or my frame of mind when reading it. And ILM is rife with opinions phrased as fact, not sure what it is about this thread in particular that has suddenly made people want to call it out.

Who knows? The whole damn Internet is rife wit opinion-as-fact, I guess.

Laura Marling songs sound like they should be in the penultimate scene of a Grey's Anatomy episode. That doesn't mean they're not good, mind.

Also, do positive opinions have to be tempered with an "I find this to be amazing"? Or is it just negative opinions that have to be phrased thusly? x-post

Positive opinions are much less likely to be perceived as dismissive of others, I'd have thought. I'm sure someone will find an example suggesting otherwise, of course.

Best Album Rated 10.0 by Pitchfork Media Upon Its Initial Release

So is it commendable that I didn't yell "fuck off" here or the million other times this opinion has been phrased like this on ILM?

Ha, yeah, I think so.

The thing is, Melissa, there are probably at least 10 artists a day discussed on ILX, whose music I find to be "horrible" yet somehow I manage not to go in those threads and tell their listeners that I'm disappointed in them for liking them.

In fact, the only time I really do go in the thread of an artist I don't get, is when I see a whole bunch of people whose tastes I usually respect, in a thread, talking about how much they love them - and in those cases, I will sometimes go in the thread and read and maybe even comment, to try and work out if *I* have missed something. (I think the last couple of times this happened was with Tuneyards and Taylor Swift?) I didn't leave either of those threads *liking* the artist, but I certainly did get a better understanding of why other people did, and if I thought I was becoming too trolly, I left, because hey, diff'rent strokes.

I was under the mistaken impression that certain people were doing something like that: "Hey, IDGI, explain to me what I'm missing here" rather than outright snob trolling. And I actually found it useful to myself to explore what I did like about that artist, even if I was perplexed and hurt by the completely out of proportion personal hostility I received in reply.

lol this thread

This (this being the album in the title of this thread) is a pop record - with everything good that entails, easily accessible, direct tunes, the prioritising of emotion and personality - that happens to have the occasional banjo on it.

Karen, I understand the tendency to conceptualize something we like and gravitate to as being somehow different from things to which it's typically compared, but this kind of inversion (i.e. the banjos are secondary) feels like a real stretch. Also, your praise of this for being pop (because it meets certain nebulous and highly subjective criteria (how can you hear the emotion and personality being prioritized here as opposed to in other similar records?)) gets at something I remember discussing on a thread earlier this year: I get disheartened when I see an embrace of pop being wielded with the same bluntness as rockism tends to be. The embrace of pop on this board felt to me (ten years ago) to be a refreshing and totally freeing escape from the confines of the usual rockist discourse, whereas statements such as yours strike me as simply another codified stance that operates the exact same within the discourse as rockism--i.e., this is good because it meets these criteria, and other things by implication are not as good for not meeting them. It's hard to continue a conversation once that gauntlet is thrown.

The problem in the discourse of the last 24 hours on this thread as I see it is that Turangalila is persistently using very emotive and subjective terms ("horrible") in pseudo-objective sentences ("this music is horrible" not "I find this music horrible"), the impact of which is made to feel snide and dismissive towards people who do like this music by the brevity and offhandedness of the delivery. So, people are happily discussing the artist, and apropos nothing, "this is horrible", which then feels like "and you are stupid for being duped by the horribleness" when dismissive talk of marketing comes in, too. It's very difficult to react to that with anything beyond aggression, because it's basically old fashioned trolling

And is this atypical of ILM, really? I also think you've got too broad a definition of trolling there.

Melissa has already said it better. And I have just been an observer here. (I think Laura Marling is pretty good and I'm curious about what she will do next, but so far it's not really my thing.)

sounds stuffy and old and alien to me. Laura M feels passionate and alive and modern, and speaks to me. ―lol sickmouthy (Scik Mouthy), Thursday, July 28, 2011 1:03 AM (8 hours ago) Bookmark

Just to clarify, the argument wasn't that laura marling should be pure like carter family or shit like that....its that she sounds exactly like lots of early 70s pop/folk-rock female singer songwriters.....who were hardly "pure" folk themselves

That being said she seems fine if unremarkable and yeah I think the time in this thread got way too nasty

https://soundcloud.com/lauramarlingofficial/laura-marling-where-can-i-go

she's the best and i can't wait for this

is that line really "if i feel like i'm better fucked than won"????

(i hope so!) (this is vg, i am hyped)

reminds me a lot of the 'i speak because i can' material which imho >>> a creature i don't know which i found mostly forgettable

obv it is a jam

is she referencing bill callahan in the album title?

kinda love how all her records have titles six syllables long

16 songs seem to be a bit much, but if they are all good as this i'll be very happy. The 2 new tracks I heard at the concert were even better iirc.

Not really feeling the new track as yet. I like how it sounds a little like "Afternoon Delight" at the very start, but it didn't grab me otherwise. I've only given it a couple of listens, and it's not terrible, so it's not putting me off anticipating the album or anything.

A 16 track Laura Marling worries me too, but new track is very good.

*album

Not too fazed by the 16 track thing as she's said in a few interviews that the album begins with a medley, so I presume she runs through the first few songs quickly in B-side-of-abbey-rd style.

Or I guess it could just as easily all be "Don't Ask Me Why"-"Salinas"-esque stuff, when you think about it. Anyway. I'm sure this'll be good.

i am a master hunter

http://www.twentyfourbit.com/2013/04/laura-marling-master-hunter/

i love it

"master hunter" is really fantastic, but tbh the album's just a bit of a snooze :(

Sounds great, really excited.

I was hoping for a "Devil's Spoke" on the new LP, and here it is.

Once I Was An Eagle Tracklist

01. “Take The Night Of”
02. “I Was An Eagle”
03. “You Know”
04. “Breathe”
05. “Master Hunter”
06. “Little Love Caster”
07. “Devil’s Resting Place”
08. “Interlude”
09. “Undine”
10. “Where Can I Go?”
11. “Once”
12. “Pray For Me”
13. “When Were You Happy? (And How Long Has That Been)”
14. “Love Be Brave”
15. “Little Bird”
16. “Saved These Words”

I don't know if all of these songs are full length or if some are just titled interludes, but 16 songs is too many Laura Marling songs in one place.

oh nm, I see this has been covered.

"devil's spoke" is one of my least favourite marling songs

too mumfordy for me

http://www.nme.com/news/laura-marling/70346

leaked

i made a new thread laura marling - once i was an eagle