LAURA MARLING
Short Movie
Ribbon Records

www.ribbonmusic.com
 

For her fifth studio record, British folk singer-songwriter Laura Marling “went electric” – a point many will highlight while overlooking the deeper transitions at play on Short Movie.

After four critically-acclaimed nu-folk records, Marling moved to Los Angeles and found herself in a common predicament: She felt lost, and she couldn’t write anymore. “I questioned whether being a musician was worthwhile,” she boldly admitted to NME. She spent two years drifting the city, applying for coffee shop jobs.

Ultimately that feeling of being lost in translation is ultimately what inspired her to pick up the electric guitar and start writing again.

“I’m just a horse with no name,” Marling croons on “Warrior,” the album’s Spaghetti Western-like opener. “Who do you think you are?” she asks herself on the album’s stirring eponymous track. “Just a girl that can play guitar.”

These are stunning confessions in a cinematic record evoking the stark scenery of the Los Angeles canyons and valleys to which she retreated. Her new home made her question herself, the lyrics openly suggest; and yet, the album itself is delivered with a newfound confidence.

While Marling may have plugged into an amp for most of the songs, she treats that new instrumentation the same way fellow folky Angel Olsen did last year for a similar transition: The primal guitar snarls only serve to accentuate the slowburn melancholia we’ve come to know from Marling – like Joni Mitchell with an occasional dark streak.

And, of course, when she fingerpicks an acoustic like old times, on “Easy,” it becomes clear that the electric guitar is not her new identity, but rather an expansion of her palette. This isn’t a reinvention, but rather a rebirth of sorts.

“You can’t get lost if you’re not on your own,” she sings. Indeed, sometimes the best way to find yourself is to first lose yourself.

Short Movies is a shining example of how well that can work.

— Andrew Kirell