Short Movie
After a run of four increasingly ambitious albums in just half a decade you’d perhaps forgive English singer/songwriter Laura Marling a dip in scope and upward trajectory on her fifth record. Not a bit of it. If anything *Short Movie* pushes further, with Marling unafraid to add blockbusting production to her exquisite bare-bones folk (witness the countryfied sass of “Strange” and the rumbling, stadium-ready thunder of “False Hope”). It’s the title track however—an existential epiphany reconfigured as a thrillingly profane call to arms—that stands shoulder-to-shoulder with her best work.
Short Movie is Laura Marling's most open and airy album yet, though it remains enigmatic. It is her first album written on electric guitar, and she clutches every guitar fill like it’s a long-lost piece of her identity, luxuriating in space and writing bigger and hazier songs to match.
Short Movie is the sound of Laura Marling’s identity crisis. It’s her first album that actually sounds comfortable, and like Marling herself, might not be fully comfortable with that fact. Once I Was An Eagle was a towering record, an intimate yet epic album full of lush, bombastic songs and vocals often feverish in…
Marling's fifth full-length delivers a reinvention, and not before time - the result is her most vital work yet.
Laura Marling is not fucking around on Short Movie. She asks some unnamed antagonist lover that same question—“Do I look…
Following in the dusty, sun-baked footsteps of 2013's mesmerizing Once I Was an Eagle, Laura Marling's fifth studio outing feels even more rooted in the California desert, doubling down on the former's penchant for pairing breezy, American west coast mysticism with bucolic, Sandy Denny-era English folk, but with a subtle shift in architecture.
Brit Award-winning singer-songwriter Laura Marling had to endure a false start followed by an unintended eight-month hiatus before writing a...
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The English singer-songwriter’s fifth album is subtly flavoured by her sojourn on the American west coast
Introspective songstress reaches for her inner rock chick. New Music CD review by Russ Coffey