Laura Marling - 3 Albums - CD Rip - MP3 (320 kbps CBR) - Includes Covers - iP00D

Alas I Cannot Swim 2007, I Speak Because I Can 2010, A Creature I Don't Know 2011
Alas I Cannot Swim - 2007 BBC Review
Amongst the soul inspired song-writings of Amy Winehouse, Adele and Duffy, it is refreshing to hear a young female singer who eschews soulful huskiness and harks back to folk. In the week that saw musical royals John Martyn and Rachel Unthank & the Winterset honoured at the BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards, 18-year-old Laura Marling is leading the way for a new folk generation. With performances at Glastonbury and Later With Jools... behind her, Marling has already made a considerable dent on the music scene.
Alas I Cannot Swim is an album that embraces the elegiac sensibilities of traditional folk and forward thinking contemporary folk music. Many have likened Marling to Joni Mitchell, Joan Baez and Sandy Denny, but Marling's sound is every bit her own. On opening track Ghosts she sounds assured, her voice arresting and powerful. "Lover please do not fall to your knees, it's not like I believe in everlasting love", Marling sings, with a conviction beyond her years.
The Reading-based singer's vocals are stunning on Old Stone - a shiveringly affecting, dignified and rousing track. Tap At My Window based on a Philip Larkin poem is equally impressive. Across the album, carefully constructed instrumental lines counter her vocal, always complementing, never suffocating.
Marling switches from playfulness to deep-set sensibility with great deftness. The bright country tempo of You're No God signals a full-blown folky knees-up while references to world folk music add edge and depth; Crawled Out Of The Sea with its marching accordion and snare riff recalls another folk revivalist, Beirut. But despite the cheery optimism, there is an underside of darkness; Night Terror, a solemn march, grows via doleful drums into a stirring call-to-arms.
Faithfully rooted in a folk heritage and at times country-tinged, Alas..., like the finest folk music, pits outward-looking paeans alongside introspective song. Marling may be young, but she has substance. An enthralling listen. --Gemma Padley
I Speak Because I Can - 2010 BBC Review
When Laura Marling appeared on the folk scene in 2008, aged 17, there was almost as much anticipation of her promise as praise for the music she produced. This was no bad thing, allowing development as an artist, and crucially not placing too much pressure or expectation on not-as-yet broad shoulders. Her debut, Alas, I Cannot Swim, was delivered to a generous critical reception, but the question asked this time round was always going to be one of progression, and the fulfilment of that abundant early talent.
Listening to Alas and second full-length, I Speak Because I Can, back-to-back, a change in tone – if not direction – is evident from opener and lead single Devil's Spoke. The production here is more deliberate and pored-over, expanding upon the earlier bare-bones approach. A leaf out of the Mumford & Sons school of orchestration has also been taken, with Rambling Man the greatest representation of this. The development in vocal styling is also stark; gone is the wispy, quick-fire phrasing and in walks deeper, slower, huskier proclamations. In many ways darkness has replaced the brightness.
It would, however, be disingenuous to paint this record as a collection of Marling's miserabilism. Despite the downbeat opening tracts, certain songs – Darkness Descends and I Speak Because I Can – abound with optimism and the ultimate, swelling crescendo of the latter displays an impressive mastery of dynamics. Similarly, at least a touch of variation is a necessity in folk, and this is demonstrated frequently, no more noticeably than when the boisterous acceleration of Alpha Shallows falls under a weight of heavy strums and gives way to the subtle, tender love letter to a country that is Goodbye England (Covered In Snow).
There was a justifiable argument to be made that Marling's real talent had to be seen live; the recorded compositions not revealing the entire picture. With I Speak Because I Can, that argument may now end. Though just 20, it doesn't appear within her scope to make an outright bad album, and here we are shown a few more glimpses of her gift, but yet not an overwhelming outpouring of it. It's clear that there has been a progression as a songwriter, with a previously unfound depth apparent on these ten tracks. Though it undoubtedly draws on the travails of the past two-or-so years, there remains, without a doubt, more in the can from young Laura. --Luke Slater
A Creature I Don't Know - 2011 BBC Review
Bob Dylan had barely put miles on his 23rd year when he wrote My Back Pages, his gleeful kiss-off to finger-wagging folk turning on his political idealism, its key lines: "But I was so much older then / I'm younger than that now". Laura Marling is only 21, but the Hampshire-born starlet shows no sign of reversing the ageing process with A Creature I Don't Know, her third album which picks up where the meandering, lips-pursed folk of 2010's I Speak Because I Can left off.
On the one hand, that means we're in for some familiar, portentous metaphor-wielding and detours into the sort of windy country ploughed by her once-beau Marcus Mumford and his figurative offspring. On the other, she wears her furrowed brow with a grace and stoic humour well in advance of her nu-folk peers; combining the sort of winking stoicism that was once the preserve of commie-sympathising, flinty-faced menfolk with the supple, jazzy tones of idol Joni Mitchell.
The Muse is a fine and fleet-footed introduction to the one of the album's central themes - muse as victim of the artist's psychic vampirism and/or beastly intentions - unfolding around a jaunty, circling guitar figure and even finding time for a brief banjo solo without losing its considerable cool. I Was Just a Card strays a trifle too close to plodding mum-rock territory but Don't Ask Me Why continues the airy, restful tone even as our protagonist is found "looking for answers in unsavoury places".
Salinas sounds like a bloated monument to the lyrical confusion at its heart ("there are no answers"), all breeze-blown acoustic and lurching, overlaid electric guitar. And The Beast is a rain-lashed monster of a tune, its descending chord sequences sinking, Rosemary's Baby-style, into some infernal bed: "Tonight I choose the beast / Tonight he lies with me".
Night After Night is a classic, folksy pick that allows Marling's voice to revel in its own beauty, while Sophia spends about a minute in search of a tune before hitting on the line, "I'm wounded by dust", and it's like the curtains have been yanked open as her vocal comes flanked by a heavenly choir and softly echoing guitar line. Then it segues into full-on country territory, talk of the judgement day and all, and you'll want to laugh but you won't be able to; such are its author's subtle charms.
Ending with a cathartic, skirt-swishing burst in All My Rage, A Creature... is another fine release from Marling, lyrically dark but skewing in the main towards an increasingly sunny, sophisticated sound. Her worldly-wise tone can still come over a little smug but give her time - she'll grow younger than this yet.
--Alex Denney