Laura Marling - I Speak Because I Can

When a teenage Laura Marling released her folk debut, she turned heads with her mature tales of life and love. Now, at 20, she backs up that early promise with her second album.

While her first record, produced by then boyfriend, Noah and the Whale frontman Charlie Fink, had a simple, sparse feel to the instrumentation, Kings of Leon producer Ethan Johns has ensured the overall sound here is darker and more polished. Opener Devil’s Spoke is a textured journey through the strings, banjo and piano of her backing band, Mumford & Sons. Marling’s voice is deeper too, her delivery slower and her delicate, beautiful poetry has developed yet further. Like Emily Brontë with an acoustic guitar, she gives an almost unbearable sense of sorrow and yearning. On Hope in The Air, she asks, “Why fear death?/Be scared of living/Our hearts are small and ever thinning.” Elsewhere, Rambling Man - which sounds like Mumford and Sons fronted by Joni Mitchell - suggests, “It’s hard to accept yourself as someone you don’t desire/As someone you don’t want to be.”

Occasional fragments of optimism prevent the album from collapsing under its own weight, like the picture postcard reminiscence of Goodbye England (Covered in Snow) and the crescendo of Alpha Swallows, during which Marling cries, “I want to be held by those arms.”

Marling plans to release her third LP before the year is out, which may prove the dark, serious, yet breathtakingly elegant, I Speak Because I Can to be merely a stepping stone. But the progression shown here suggests it may very well be a stepping stone towards greatness.

Review by Rob Townsend.