“Patterns In Repeat” (Chrysalis/Partisan Records)
By Eleni P. Austin
There is something so compelling about Laura Marling’s voice. It pulls you in and holds you close. Intimate and confessional, caustic and conversational. It often feels as though she is revealing her deepest secrets, sharing some existential truth. There’s a gravitas there that belies her years.
Born in 1990, Laura grew up in Hampshire, England, the youngest of three daughters. She was raised on a farm near Wokingham. Despite a pedigreed background, her father, Charles William Somerset Marling, 5th Baronet, who went by Charlie, ran a small recording studio on the property.
Plenty of bands, including Black Sabbath and The LA’s, made albums there. By the time she was six, Laura had mastered the chord changes to Neil Young’s “The Needle And The Damage Done.” When she celebrated her 13th birthday, her parents gave her two records, Joni Mitchell’s Blue and Patti Smith’s Horses. The die was cast.
Determined to have a music career, she moved to London in 2006. Rather serendipitously, the U.K was experiencing a Folk Music revival. Although she was just 16, she fell in with like-minded players. She was briefly part of Noah & The Whale’s original line-up, but she ended up pursuing a solo career. Soon enough, she was sharing stages with up-and-comers like Jaime T. and Adele.
Two years later, her debut, Alas, I Cannot Swim arrived. The record was embraced by fans and critics alike. The music press was hailing her as “the next Joni Mitchell. Within six months she moved up from opening act to headlining 3,000 seat venues. Rather than rest on her laurels, she returned to the studio and in 2010 saw the release of I Speak Because I Can, produced by Ethan Johns. Ethan had become the go-to producer for everyone from Ryan Adams and the Kings Of Leon to The Jayhawks and Rufus Wainwright. A creative partnership was forged that carried through to 2011’s Creature I Don’t Know and 2013’s watershed effort, Once I Was An Eagle.
Once… was a revelation. Drawing inspiration from disparate touchstones like Joni Mitchell, Led Zeppelin and Kate Bush. The lyrics offered a sanguine treatise on the agony of heartbreak, the restorative power of solitude and the Butterflies of new romance.
Laura relocated to Los Angeles, and her next effort, Short Movie, took a sharp left turn. The self-produced album incorporated electronic instrumentation, and she adopted a singing style that felt more aggressive. It garnered positive reviews and sold well but ultimately felt unsatisfactory. She was back on track with 2017’s Semper Femina.
Taking a break from her solo music, she collaborated with Tunng co-founder, Mike Lindsey, forming a duo called Lump. A self-titled effort arrived in 2018, and they returned three years later with Animal. She resumed her solo career just in time for the pandemic. With a title like Song For Our Daughter, fans assumed she was having a child, but the title was inspired by Maya Angelou’s book, Letter To My Daughter. Loose-limbed and sure-footed, the record garnered a Grammy nomination (her second) for Best Folk Album.
Now, year after giving birth to her daughter, Maudie, Laura has returned with her eighth long-player, Patterns Repeat. The album opens on a tranquil note with “Child Of Mine.” Ambient chatter and contented baby sounds are supplanted by tremulous acoustic guitar, gossamer strings and celestial backing vocals. Laura wraps her evocative pipes around lyrics that address the moments of bliss and panic that accompany parenthood: “Last night in your sleep you started crying, I can’t protect you there, though I kept trying, sometimes you’ll go to places I can’t get to, but I’ve spoken to the angels that protect you, because you’re mine, they cast this golden light across this child.” Delicate piano fills dart throughout the mix, by the final verse, lyrics fully commit to a future of life in the slow lane: “Long nights, fast years, so they say, time won’t feel the same, and I don’t want to miss it, and I’m not going to miss it, child of mine.”
Even as this record revels in the highs and lows of motherhood and family life, it’s quite clear that mortality is on her mind. Take “The Shadows,” rippling acoustic arpeggios are accented by shivery strings and dusty piano notes. Despite Laura’s sing-song delivery, lyrics drill down on the feeling of abandonment that follows a loss: “I tried to persuade her in vain, of course later, that’s something that I deny, I knew it was better to say in my letter that I never even tried…She’s leaving, she’s leaving, my alter she’s leaving, where will I go to hide? She lives in the shadows of my mind.”
Meanwhile, Looking Back” is written from the perspective of an elderly person confined to a chair, with only memories for company. Finger-picked guitar chords are nearly enveloped by stacked harmonies on the opening verses: “Now I’m a prisoner in this chair, confined to younger faces, my memories are not with them, but off in distant places.” A feathery string section, anchored by lowing cello, underscores the angst and ennui. But dwelling on happier days: “The things we had, the love we shared, perhaps like any other, but even now, how sweet it is to think of things recovered” provides a panacea for the soul.
Then there’s “Your Girl,” which alludes to the passing of a former love. The song is powered by bare-bones acoustic guitar, sinuous soft synths and melancholy Mellotron. Feelings of anger, loss, betrayal and grief quietly coexist in lines like “I’m trying to play a boy’s game, feeling like a pawn inside a pornscape.” But then there’s a deluge of emotions: “I rushed around to ask my friends, is this what it feels like when it ends? Then I heard it on your last breath, so this is what it feels like to be left alone.”
The record saves the most bandwidth for songs about parenthood and family, and rightly so. Along with the aforementioned “Child Of Mine” there’s also “Patterns” and “Patterns Repeat.” On the former, sun-dappled chord clusters ripple in concentric circles atop swoony strings. Laura’s vocals meander as lyrics speak to the familial cycles that recur. The final verse reveals a personal pentimento: “Pulled for meaning, I arched my back, and then from the black you were born, forward and leaning at first, abstract, you soon contract into form and now the time leaps by and starts to fly, and only then can I see that we’re patterns in repeat and we’ll always be.”
The latter is a graceful roundelay that blends lithe acoustic guitars, saturnine strings, a bit of byzantine bouzouki and sparse percussion, bookended by basses both synth and double. Her mien is slightly solipsistic as she chastises a friend’s life choices: “You had your children on the fly, another child, another guy, another chance to fall in love again, I fear they may have paid the price, for the freedom of your life.” But by the song’s denouement she is speaking to her own child and hinting that her music career might take a backseat for a while: “I want you to know I gave it up willingly, nothing real was lost in the bringing of you to me, I want you to have a piece of my maternal flame, part of me, eternity, tolerance for pain.”
Both “No One’s Gonna Love You Like I Can” and “Lullaby” are also aimed directly at her daughter. On “No One…” ticklish piano notes hopscotch across a swelling string section. Lyrics like “…If life is just a dream, I’m going to make it mean something worth a damn” She offers up a pledge and prognostication on the final verse: “No one’s going to love you like I can.”
As advertised, “Lullaby” is exactly that. Rustic acoustic notes and sylvan strings weave a pastoral aural tapestry. Laura gently croons a maternal mantra: “Safe in my arms, safe in my arms, sleep, my angel, you’re safe with me.”
“Caroline” is the album’s outlier, and it’s also the best track. Cascading, Flamenco-flavored guitar runs partner with moony strings that simply echo and sway. Laura easily slips into the skin of an elderly widower surprised by a phone call from a long-lost love. Lyrics like “Caroline, we are old now, I got married and I loved my wife, I have kids, they’re good and grown now, all in all, I’ve been happy with my life,” leave little room for equivocation. The lovely chorus of “la-la-la-la- la-la-la-la-la-la-la, something, something Caroline” almost takes the sting out of the final verse: “I’d like you not to call again, I’d like to keep you off my mind, you’re the one who went away, Caroline, so the song was forgotten over time.”
The record is dotted with a couple of instrumentals. “Interludes (Time Passages)” lands smack in the middle of the album, acting as something of a melodic palate-cleanser. Closing out the set is a flowery version of “Lullaby.”
In recent interviews, Laura says she has contemplated putting her music career on pause. So that she is able to concentrate on raising her children (in November she announced she was expecting). Obviously, that strategy worked pretty well for Kate Bush, who has always made music on her own terms. If Patterns In Repeat is Laura’s last record before she takes an extended hiatus from the music world, well, she’s left us in pretty good company.
