Laura Marling - I Speak Because I Can

Laura Marling is part of the indie-folk revolution that has gripped new music for the last couple of years. It started when a small group of friends started helping each other out with their music; giving each other support slots at their gigs and playing various weird and wonderful instruments on their albums. This group of friends from Wimbledon now make up the majority of some of the best albums from the last three or four years. It consists of Laura Marling, Mumford & Sons, Jamie T, Noah and the Whale and Johnny Flynn.

Laura Marling’s second album ‘I Speak Because I Can’ is the deepest, darkest and most mysterious of the lot. Complete with new “take me seriously” hair (her once pixie-like blonde locks have been dyed pitch black) this brooding masterpiece is like taking the darker tracks from Mumford & Sons’ outstanding ‘Sigh No More’ and adding the deepest Joni Mitchell vocals over it. Marling describes it as being based on “responsibility, particularly the responsibility of womanhood.” There are no real light hearted tracks, unlike her outstanding debut ‘Alas, I Cannot Swim’ which was scattered with cheery acoustic folk, although ‘the mature album’ seems too petty a judgement for such a good album, but it does sum it up plainly.

Produced by Ethan Johns (Kings of Leon, Ray LaMontagne, and sadly THAT abomination of a Paolo Nuitini album – it still puts shivers down my spine) and with arguably the best new band of 2009 as her backing band (Mumford & Sons) it was destined to be a hit. If she wrote ‘Alas, I Cannot Swim’ when she was 16 and, for want of a better word, ‘immature’ in her songwriting then this was always going to be ‘the mature album’ and with the added load of a break up with Noah and the Whale singer (the band Marling started out with) it was destined to gloom… however Marling seems to do gloomy better than she does content!

Live ‘I Speak…’ is outstanding. Real hairs on the neck stuff. She is a true modern troubadour and her haunting voice and her solo guitar is fantastic. Highlights include the title track, the downright spooky ‘Devil’s Spoke’, ‘Goodbye England (Covered in Snow)’ which is probably as close to cheery as the album gets, and ‘Rambling Man’

With Mumford & Sons beginning work on their new album, Laura Marling trying to get another album out by September and Jamie T back on the gigging scene, all I can say is viva la indie-folk-revoloution!

'I Speak Because I Can' is out now on Virgin Records.