album review: laura marling, once I was an eagle
There was a time before the Internet, when personal mythology was the accumulative result of a life lived thoroughly. Nowadays, legends are created through Twitter feuds, terrible SNL performances and viral YouTube clips.
But there’s something a little bit old school about Laura Marling, the English folk-darling who has just released her fourth studio album, Once I Was An Eagle. In the face of burgeoning alt and pop movements, Marling is refreshingly true to form – writing songs of love and loss that echo the sounds of eras long past.
Though barely into her twenties, Marling has a world-weary richness in both voice and observation that most can only hope to achieve by their twilight years. In saying that, this is her most mature record to date. The arrangements are lush and rollicking on tracks such as Master Hunter– as Marling continues to fill out the shoes she crafted for herself with her eloquent, if more sparse, debut, Alas, I Cannot Swim.
Saved These Words is perhaps the album highlight. A soaring ode to hope and missed opportunities, Marling’s ability to pen the kind of lyrics that make you feel okay about wanting to burn everything your ex ever gave you, is well and truly on show.
At sixteen songs the album is proof Marling isn’t running short of things to say, but this also sees it’s grip on the listener wane slightly at some intervals. This is not because of a lack of quality, but rather because of the density of both the arrangements and lyrics. Yet it is a small flaw in what is a robust record that holds its own amongst Marling’s complex body of work.
Though often dark in tone, many of the songs have a refreshing surface brightness that belies the lyrics. This is apparent on opener I Was An Eagle, as Marling declares stoically, “I will not be a victim of romance.” It’s an engaging contradiction that exists within the image of Marling herself – at a time both young and timid, and cynical and world-weary.
So give Once I Was An Eagle a spin when you feel like being grown up, hosting a fancy do or sobbing under the covers in the most sophisticated of ways. And know that in twenty or thirty years, Laura Marling will probably still be recording beautiful songs and you will be telling people, with a hint of jealousy, about the shy nymph who had released four exceptional albums by twenty-three. Because Marling is, in her own quiet way, creating the kind of mythology that will never be reaped from flame wars or illiterate cats.
