Laura Marling - Patterns in Repeat

Laura Marling’s rightly-lauded last album, ‘Song For Our Daughter’ (2020), saw her achieve the supreme feat of creating an intensely moving body of work around an imagined child; in the four years since, she actually has become a mother, and the result is ‘Patterns In Repeat’ - a tapestry of love, lineage, and the inextricable links between parents and their children. Now eight albums in, Marling has always mined emotional depths with only the most simple of tools - namely, an acoustic guitar and that singular voice - and here, her signature understatedness is taken even further. The record features no drums at all; instead, each track is blanketed by swathes of lush strings, any additional embellishment having been deemed surplus to requirements. As such, ‘Patterns In Repeat’ is both stunningly intimate and endearingly raw; recorded in Marling’s home studio with her child there in the room, there are aural fingerprints of domesticity - her baby’s gurgling, or the shake of a dog collar - stamped across the finished product, enduring testaments to the context of its creation. 

The love of a parent is an obvious, palpable throughline - opener ‘Child Of Mine’ is the purest distillation of such, a pact made and promise sworn: “Last night in your sleep you started crying / I can’t protect you there though I keep trying / Sometimes you’ll go places I can’t get to / But I’ve spoken to the angels who’ll protect you”. Around this central spool, however, are wound the threads of the myriad other emotions parenthood awakens. ‘Looking Back’ (written by Marling’s own father when he was in his twenties) and the incredibly poignant ‘Your Girl’ (which lands like a response to the call of ABBA’s ‘Slipping Through My Fingers’) both speak to a renewed, acute awareness of the passing of time; centrepiece ‘The Shadows’ is a reflective rumination on how the start of one chapter necessitates the end of another. The twinned ‘Patterns’ and ‘Patterns In Repeat’, meanwhile, see her consider her own childhood through a different, more empathetic lens, having gained a deeper understanding of the behaviours and decisions of her parents.

“I want you to know that I gave it up willingly / Nothing real was lost in the bringing of you to me,” Marling sings softly on the titular closing track. Ahead of giving birth, she has said she faced the internal question of whether motherhood would dilute or extinguish her artistry. ‘Patterns In Repeat’ is a deft and conclusive answer.