Laura Marling - Short Movie

Short Movie is the fifth studio album by British singer-songwriter Laura Marling, released in March 2015 via Virgin Records.

Laura Marling is not most acts, at 25, five albums and eight years into her career she had proven herself to be more consistent and yet more willing to evolve than most in her field. She’s a rarity, a genuine creative free spirit who lets the waves of the world buffet her where they may, until she’s ready to document what she’s seen.

With Short Movie she has, for the fifth consecutive time, made the strongest album of her career, expanding her palette to include electric-guitar-led alt rock (“False Hope”’ “Don’t Let Me Bring You Down”) and percussive drones (“Strange”, “Short Movie”) while retaining the English-rose folk that made her name (“Walk Alone”, “Easy”). There’s a clear through-line to her earliest work, yet a clearer progression that points to an evolving artist - which is of course how it’s supposed to go.

Marling lets the rootless turmoil of her recent life inform her choices: she’s spent the last few years moving from LA to London via a fairly ramshackle route, touring with just her guitar up the west coast of America, before attempting to settle in upstate New York to study poetry (her application was turned down.) In that time there’s been relationships, there’s been art, there’s been self-discovery. It seems quite the journey, and like any good folk singer it manifests in her work.

Short Movie is a heaving stew of influences, as emotionally informed as the songs she was writing when she was 17 but much less raw. There’s more detachment here than her earlier work, and she holds herself as a slightly distant observer of her own life. Thus we have “Warrior”, in which she styles herself as a “horse with no name,” whose warrior is unworthy of the ride, and while that imagery isn’t quite as bluntly suggestive as it sounds, it’s not entirely innocent either- sex, as much as love, pops up frequently here.

“Gurdjieff's Daughter” takes the words out of the author’s mouth altogether as she relates verbatim the advice dictated to Chilean film-maker Alejandro Jodorowsky by a cultist sex-partner (mid act, apparently,) with Marling skilfully slicing the prose into what might be her most straightforwardly-pop song yet.

Marling’s voice is in new territory, less concerned with pitch and tone, more interested in character and wit. The spine tingling “Howl At The Moon” however suggests, she’s still capable of raising goosebumps. These are creative choices, exploring themes as much in her presentation as in her lyrics.

Marling does a fine job producing, and the record is full of interesting clatters, rattles and wipes panned wide at the edge of hearing. It makes for an immersive listen. Her playing is excellent too, with far more emphasis on feel and rhythm than folky delicacy.

Short Movie poses two questions: firstly how the hell did Laura Marling get turned down by a poetry course? - her words here are evocative and interesting throughout - and secondly, where would she go next? This is Marling at her finest, but as she’s proved five times in a row, the best is always yet to come.

Check out the tracks: “False Hope”; “Short Movie” and “I Feel Your Love”. 

This Limited double LP housed in a gatefold sleeve is pressed in Europe on black vinyl.