Album Review Laura Marling - Short Movie

With ‘Once I Was An Eagle’, Laura Marling earned her stripes as one of the key folk artists of her generation. Relentlessly pursuing naivety, while wryly tossing around sly references to greats like Bob Dylan - and, indeed, Marling‘s own formidable reputation - it was a complex, intense, and hugely accomplished record. It came from a place of questioning loneliness, too. “All I see is road / No-one takes me home/ Where can I go?” she sang, with new honest, vulnerability. Following her fourth album, Laura Marling’s reputation preceded her. Belonging, though, still eluded her. In interviews she openly admitted several times that she was considering packing the music thing in altogether.

Marling’s fifth album sees her falling back in love with music all over again after a long bout of urban alienation in LA. While ‘Once I Was An Eagle’ was a master of taut, stringently forensic string arrangements, ‘Short Movie’ has a cinematic, wide-eyed joy, and Marling’s writing seems freer, and less rigorous. ‘False Hope’, inspired by the experience of being trapped in a New York Air Bnb during Hurricane Sandy, swirls round in a sea of electric guitars. ‘Gurdjieff’s Daughter’, - a song named after a mystic’s daughter who teaches artists to rediscover their creativity - pulls a huge chorus out of its back pocket with the ease of somebody producing a lighter.