Ready those flood defences, the deluge of new female singer-songwriters refuses to abate. Laura Marling may not be getting quite as much coverage as Adele or Duffy, but of 2008’s songstress starlets she might just be the best. Alas I Can’t Swim, the Reading youngster’s debut, is an album of bracingly idiosyncratic folk, its songs full of doomed, doe-eyed romanticism. The cynic might question what this slip of a girl, so gaunt, so willowy, so still a teenager for god’s sake, could possibly know about love, but when Marling sings she provides the most articulate of answers.
Beth Orton is an obvious point of comparison, but there are some truly incandescent moments here, moments when it seems like she’s channelling Joni Mitchell circa 1971. Yes, that good. And damn is this girl blue. Her narratives are gracefully observed vignettes, painfully lovelorn and melancholic such as ‘Your Only Doll (Dora)’ and, yes, occasionally a little hysterical in their introspection, as on ‘My Manic And I’, but always Marling is captivating. There’s a wonderful vulnerability to this record, songs like the opener ‘Ghosts’, or ‘Cross Your Fingers’ so touching in their naivety.
Even if you can’t find it within you to acknowledge that part of yourself that was once an adolescent, to revisit those giddy emotions, then at least you can appreciate the simple beauty of the music. Unvarnished, devastating in its simplicity, the old guitar and voice one-two of Alas I Can’t Swim packs more punch than a pugilist’s convention. All told this is a knockout of a record.