The fifth album from the artist enticingly described in one US paper as “the pin-up girl of the neo-Brit folk-rock movement” is a curious thing: a record that sounds like a masterpiece at first, but which frays slightly with deeper listening. It’s not the fault of the songs – though Short Movie isn’t quite as strong as the brilliant Once I Was an Eagle, it’s still pretty masterly – but Marling’s voice. A spell spent living in LA has left her wanting not just to bring elements of the Laurel Canyon sound into her music, but also left her employing an obtrusive American accent that at times – as on the sprechgesang of Strange – overwhelms the song. But it feels churlish to criticise too much: Marling’s a prodigiously gifted writer, dissecting her dissastisfaction with surgical certainty: “Love seems to be some kind of trickery,” she sings on Don’t Let Me Bring You Down, “Some great thing, to which I am a mystery.” It’s less musically intense than its predecessor – as well as the usual neo-Brit folk rock, there’s spindly and angular rock and even, on Gurdjieff’s Daughter, an unmistakable debt to Sultans of Swing. Short Movie feels like the work of someone who’s going to be around for a long time.
