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After having offered myself up as a folk enthusiast to TheYorker, it was with some surprise that I was handed an album by the much-hyped Laura Marling – an artist I had heard compared to, horror of horrors, indie queen Kate Nash, and who I had proceeded to dutifully avoid since. I was not encouraged by her appearance: exceptionally young, exceedingly blonde, and excessively angsty-looking. I prepared myself for a biting diatribe against mediocrity.
Thankfully, looks (and rumours) really do turn out to be deceptive. Unlike her more MySpace-savvy non-soundalike Nash, Miss Marling breaks free of the Generic Indie Formula (and that includes her ignorable first hit ‘New Romantic’) in favour of the more traditional – and therefore, in a way, more versatile – folk. Her dark, edgy songs fall into the league of Bat for Lashes and Cat Power, replete with gracefully literate lyrics and singing that fluctuates from ethereal to deadpan. What’s more, there’s experimentation: violins and trumpets abound, the backing vocals are provided by a male choir, and ‘Your Only Doll (Dora)’ is divided by a two-minute interlude of birds singing.
What is perhaps most impressive, especially for Marling’s tender age of eighteen, is the lyrical prowess at play here. With song titles like ‘Crawled Out of the Sea (Interlude)’ and ‘My Manic and I’, it comes as no surprise that she’s into Philip Larkin and Bob Dylan. The wistful lyrics infuse her songs with a sense of mystery, while retaining a sense of humour at all times: ‘gold is fleeting, gold is fickle, gold is fun,’ ‘he wants to die in a lake in Geneva’ and ‘I sold my soul to Jesus and since then I’ve had no fun’ cropping up as some of her best lines.
The extravagant hype surrounding Marling is perhaps unwarranted: ‘ground-breaking’ is not a word that could easily be used about her, the songwriting at times sounds a little undeveloped, and the album does not quite reach the sublimely breathtaking heights of genius that some are ascribing to it. But Alas I Cannot Swim is positively brimming with potential – keep an eye on her.
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