I Speak Because I Can

Laura Marling’s second album bubbles and broils with contradictions. On the one hand, the Hampshire folkstress, all wide-eyed coos and breathy warbles, cleaves tightly to the archetype of doe-eyed waif. And yet there’s are glimpses of steel too – on single ‘Devil’s Spoke’ she is a woman possessed, slapping her guitar whilst her mannered croon slips free of its shackles so that, for a moment, it sounds as if she’s about to break into a snarl. If she’s agitated, you can hardly blame her. Last year her ex-boyfriend, Noah and the Whale’s Charlie Fink, wrote a concept album about their separation, painting 20 year old Marling as quite the ice queen. A well-brought up young lady from the London commuter belt, Marling is naturally too classy to turn I Speak Because I Can into a revenge letter. Nonetheless, the record contains plenty of clues as to her state of mind: on ‘Rambling Man’ she points out that heartache flows both ways (‘I’m broken too, and spoken for, do not tempt me’); ‘Goodbye England’ sees her kicking out at everyone who has ever tried to control her (‘I tried to be a girl who likes to be used/ ’m too good for that/ There’s a mind under this hat’). A triumph of devastating understatement.