“It’s my birthday tomorrow,” confides Laura Marling as her set nears its end, and the sardine-tight audience serenades her with a massed Happy Birthday. Marling has been a bewitching musical presence for so long that it seems remarkable she is only just turning 25.
She has made four studio albums and is previewing the imminent fifth, Short Movie, with a short tour of intimate gigs such as tonight’s show in a 150-capacity north London shoebox. Up close, it is clear that she has little in common now with the waifish ingenue who debuted with Alas, I Cannot Swim in 2008.
Marling has been doing a lot of living lately, including two years living alone in Los Angeles, and it shows. Where once she wore her talent awkwardly, like a great coat on a skeletal frame, now there is a heft and swagger to her material and its presentation. Her soaring, steadfast alto on the gothic folk of Warrior, a quietly epic history of a dying love, is a thing of wonder.
The new album sees her go electric, and she is backed here by a three-piece band. The poised art-rock of Strange, wherein she delivers an arch kiss-off to a married lover, has the rawness of Patti Smith; on Walk Alone, her hurt peal of a voice aims barbed regrets at the back of a departing beau.
She closes with the chiming, brutally self-eviscerating title track from the new album, then slips off stage to commence her birthday celebrations. If she continues applying this creative rigour to her multiplying life experiences, it’s staggering to think how good Laura Marling could become.
At The Caves, Edinburgh (0131-557-8989) on 4 February, then touring.
