In music as in myth, adventurers are forever setting off on journeys, testing themselves. The medieval bards wandered; the Beats did too. Sixties folks imagined not only communes, but the endless road rising before them, a shoulder-slung guitar their only constant companion. (There would be other companions, of course, to sing about.)
It’s no small triumph that one of the most intriguing of our contemporary questers should be the sullen, elfin daughter of a baronet. Just 25, with five albums under her belt, Laura Marling has grown up on record, writing elliptical songs about inner lives that belied her scrawny year-count. She didn’t sound sheltered on her debut, Alas, I Cannot Swim, although her chosen medium – folk – has an in-built tone of smug mystery, as though the singer’s role is to impart their great wisdom on a reverential listenership. Strange, one of the highlights of Short Movie, is a top finger-wag, in which Marling makes like Bob Dylan, sneering at some schmuck who doesn’t know himself, but loves Marling nonetheless. “When you fall in love with me/Your love becomes my responsibility…. Do you know how hard that is?” she spits.
Turns out Marling wasn’t an old soul after all. Months of travelling around America by herself, absorbing the works of mystical film-maker and writer Alejandro Jodorowsky, doing yoga, getting high, learning tarot and meeting people whose lives were radically different from her own opened her eyes. In a nutshell, Short Movie (“It’s a short movie, man,” one of her shaman buddies notes) finds an anonymous Marling at a loose end in LA, trying to figure out what might be next. “I’m a woman now, could you believe?” she sings on Don’t Let Me Bring You Down. “Who do you think you are?/Just a girl who can play guitar,” the title track self-flagellates.
It turned out that what Marling wanted to do was to play more electric guitar – False Hope is a terrific rock song, recalling PJ Harvey’s Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea – and lay some unscored strings across her tracks, a white noise symbolising the urban drones against which these songs were written (LA) and recorded (Hackney). Every successive Marling album has sounded more accomplished, exploring tangents while remaining grounded in her versatile voice and excellent guitar-playing, and Short Movie performs this trick yet again. Minus producer Ethan Johns, this one is a little looser, a little more accessible, and – if it doesn’t bear much evidence of dropping out, tuning in, mysticism or tumbleweed – as intriguing as you would hope from this reliably aloof troubadour, who, despite singing from the point of view of a horse on Warrior, is more human here too.
That’s not always a good thing. How Can I stands out as the album’s most conventional moment, in which Marling – the least lovey-dovey singer-songwriter going – wonders, “How will I live without you?” The elephant in the room is Joni Mitchell’s Hejira, where the conflict between freedom and love looms large.
Mostly, Marling’s songs are rightly sceptical of love, prodding the emotional state with sticks or a scalpel by turn; it’s rare to hear her keen to run away with someone. Short Movie’s best songs are all about Marling’s ongoing voyage of self-discovery; an indulgence we not only permit musicians, but pay them for, on the condition we can listen in and pick up tips. There are plenty of those here. As Gurdjieff’s daughter tells Jodorofsky on Gurdjieff’s Daughter: “Never consider yourself or others without knowing that you’ll change.”
