'Do I look like I'm fucking around?' It’s an oddly stark interrogation amidst the elsewhere breezy and sweeping Americana of Short Movie. But, there is the slightest hint that this question is posed through a smiling mouth – that she may, in fact, actually be fucking around. A little bit. As soon as you hear it, of course, it’s gone – and this is characteristic of Short Movie as a whole. It is an album of contradictions – intimate yet spacious, playful, but occasionally bullish, cinematic but full of improvisation. The one constant is autonomy – Laura Marling has a sublime confidence, and you trust that she knows exactly what she’s trying to achieve.
Playing with contradictions has been Marling's signature for most of her career. Previous album Once I Was An Eagle was simultaneously close and grandiose, with songs that would drift into life with softly-strummed acoustic guitars, before soaring strings and tabla percussion breathed a heavy and restless soul into them. The album found Marling mercurially tiptoeing through the bones of a past relationship, and a past life – it was made shortly before she headed off to America with little more than a guitar and a clutch of books – but always staying clear of details, preferring to remain in the abstract realm of myth, stories and basic human desires. It was breathless and intense, Marling a conduit for whatever heaven-borne message needed to be heard.
But it was still the closest Laura Marling has come to making a personal connection with listeners – the songs audibly recorded in one room, with one guitar and one microphone (and, apparently, often in one take). It is odd, and in many ways unique in the modern age, that the two albums that truly established her musical voice, 2010's I Speak Because I Can and its follow-up A Creature I Don't Know, established little of Laura Marling the personality.
She never shied away from the 'I' of the songs, inhabiting the characters that she had made for herself - the quiet homebody, the wistful traveller, the spurned lover - with sensitivity and self-belief. But, whether there were any flashes of Marling's true self quickly became difficult to contemplate as the songs unfurled themselves. And, indeed, it wasn't a question that Marling had any intent of answering. On Eagle, she sauntered closer, but there was always a limit – just as your eyes became accustomed to the light, she would slip your blindfold back on, draw the curtains, lock the door.
Short Movie is the first album of Marling’s where she does not feel the need to employ characters. Or, if she does, she is playing the part of Laura Marling – Brit relocated to LA, seeking anonymity, purpose and an identity away from the music that she has grown up making.
It is the closest she’s come to autobiography – there are scattered references to places, people, specific times and places. The punky, frenetic False Hope establishes Marling’s new voice immediately – discussing living in a Manhattan apartment block with parties on one side, crazy women on the other, and a creeping desire to return home to the safety of regularity. Musically, too, this is probably the most immediate she has ever been – dirty electric guitars, pounding, garage-tinged drums, and a cresting pop chorus.
Easy finds her escaping the city, to the Californian desert – ‘looking for God in Santa Cruz’ – a real trip (heh) that Marling made in her search for purpose. She sings of the simplicity of youth, but does not sound wholly wanting – perhaps realising that the pleasure of life is in the journey, in growing up, getting lost and, why not, spending ‘a month thinking I was a high desert tree’. She definitely sounds more at peace, the music gentle and lilting, strings enveloping her gentle fingerpicking.
Gurdjieff’s Daughter picks up the pace – an airy, sun-kissed celebration of vitality, all breathless vocals and Smiths-y guitar flourishes. The lyrics are cribbed almost verbatim from a set of rules left by a Russian philosopher to his offspring, found by Marling on her travels – ‘Never give orders just to be obeyed’, ‘Don’t be impressed by strong personalities’. It becomes clear here, as her voice breaks with a chuckle part-way through, that this album is a much-needed breather after the necessarily fevered Eagle.
This is epitomised in the title track, in which Marling asserts, amid shoegazey washes of guitar, ‘it’s a short fucking movie, man’ – a quote from a hippie she befriended, repurposed with a twinkle and a grin. Her singing and guitar playing are less deliberate and more carefree, and she is happy to skirt around the edges of an idea, rather than pin it down and deconstruct it.
However, Short Movie isn’t a complete sea change. Marling is still a commanding and enchanting presence, and still occasionally abrasive, as on Strange – which takes the dancing rhythm and running guitar of Master Hunter, and overlays a snappy, almost spoken-word dressing down of a cheating husband. There is still a timeless, abstract quality to a few of the tracks – Warrior and Howl use familiar references to mythology, beasts, moors and mountains. But she offsets the more typical lyricisms with that rawer, delightfully imperfect musical approach, aided by the new preference for electric guitars over acoustic and all the crackles, pops and buzzes that this entails.
One of the most familiar sounding tracks on here, How Can I, conversely talks of ‘taking more risks’ – perhaps not in the conventional sense, but in the sense of being more open and direct, both in her music and in herself. There is the impression that, despite the generally more relaxed aura around Short Movie, Marling had to try to get to this point. It is telling that in interviews, she has called this album ‘the middle of a thought', rather than the finished article.
This is a thread that runs through many of the songs, as she tries to reconcile the musician Laura Marling, with the fully-formed person that she would like to be. Closer Worship Me leaves that thought without a conclusion, as she sings ‘I might be blind, but I am free’, sounding like she’s trying to convince herself as much as the listener that it is okay to not know things, to not be comfortable or feel complete.
There is still the same delicately poised emotional core on Short Movie as on past albums – the difference is that this comes more directly from Marling, rather than the storytelling and allegory that she has become known for. It is transitional in a sense, as she still occasionally steps back behind the veil – but these moments, rather than detract, serve to flesh out the idea that this album is a journey, made in real-time across 13 tracks.
You can’t have a truly appealing story without conflict, of course, and Marling’s conflict here is with herself – coming to terms with being an established, critically-acclaimed musician, being a young woman, or simply coming to terms with being. On the title track, she breaks this question down, tackling it in its most basic form with a cheeky, very Hollywood response – ‘Who do you think you are?.. Just a girl that can play guitar.’ And while that is a large part of who she is, she is clearly so much more – hopefully we get to see this in the sequel.
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