Album Review: Laura Marling, Short Movie

It’s two years since Laura Marling’s last album and 18 months since her stunning storm-wracked performance at Dublin’s Olympia — one of those turns that sucked all the air out of the room and left an entire audience weak-kneed.

What we didn’t know was that Marling was teetering on burn-out — having released four LPs in a half-decade’s frenzy of creativity. She had devoted most of her adulthood to the peripatetic life of a touring musician (she joined her first band aged 16) and was falling out of love with music.

Short Movie is a chronicle of her existential struggle, the tempestuous subject matter channelled into songs that roil and shriek. On her first fully plugged-in project, Marling has stepped beyond her buttoned-down persona, and provides an insight into the occasionally confused human inside.

This makes for a compelling, albeit ragged listen. Though less-polished than her earlier output, the material is also less- restrained.

The centre-piece, arguably, is ‘Strange’, on which Marling rails against middle-class certainties, even as she displays a backhanded envy of those who want nothing more from life than spouse, family and a roof over their head.

Elsewhere, she wends her way through torrid emotional landscapes, her guitar kinking and thrilling, her singing contorted into a stark parody of an American accent.

On ‘Don’t Let Me Bring You Down’ she dismisses the endlessly positive vibes of California, her temporary home for most of 2014, and, with the barbed ‘Howl’, seems determined to frighten away all the nu-folk fans who discovered her by dint of her early relationship with Marcus Mumford, of Mumford and Sons.

Swerving and swooning constantly, Short Movie makes for sweltering, sometimes uneasy company — but, at all times, you are cognisant that Marling may well have crafted her masterpiece.

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