A Creature I Don’t Know

A confluence of well-off Londoners bashing banjos, growing their hair out and roving the planet in designer waist-coats, it’d be ridiculously easy to hate nu-folk. Particularly when, for reasons at once baffling and disturbing, it has been adopted as the favourite genre of SoCoDu jock types (when Mumford and Sons were joined by several Ireland rugby players at Electric Picnic for a self satisfied encore last year you were witnessing the musical equivalent of towel snapping in the locker-room).

Amidst the smug clatter of washboards, accordions and affected Americanisms, it’s the quiet one, Laura Marling, who has always stood apart. Not because her background is radically different to that of her toffish former beaus Marcus Mumford or Charlie Fink of Noah and the Whale. The daughter of Sir Charles William Somerset Marling, she is, if anything, posher than both put together. But there is little sense of a rich girl on a lark, for whom a career in music is scarcely more than glorified gap year. On her two previous albums she demonstrated the sort of steady artistic progress and slowly unfurling ambition that is the mark of a singer who is in it for the long haul. On her debut Alas I Cannot Swim she wistfully name-dropped Keats and played up the persona of the cripplingly shy teenager hiding behind her fringe. Last year’s I Speak Because I Can was her coming of age moment, where she dropped her affectations and gave straightforward homage to her influences (chiefly Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen - how refreshing to encounter a young female musician not hopelessly in hock to Kate Bush).

Far from coming off as the outpourings of a glorified tribute artist, the record painted Marling as a real talent, an impression confirmed by A Creature I Don’t Know, assembled in America, Argentina and Britain between touring commitments late last year. Again working with Kings of Leon producer Ethan Johns, she opens with the campfire shuffle of ‘The Muse’, perhaps the spikiest track she’s yet recorded with none of the adolescent moochiness that was previously a hallmark.

From here, the quality hardly wavers: ‘I Was Just A Card’ is plugged in and swaggering; companion pieces ‘Don’t Ask Me Why’ and ‘Salinas’ gorgeous and slow building, twinkling with mystery (for once Marling hinting at rather than enunciates her emotions). Best of all is ‘Night After Night’, a powerful rumination on the destructive power of all consuming love. Stripped down to just voice and chilly strumming, the emotional devastation Laura Marling wreaks is awesome to behold.