Artist : Laura Marling
Album : Patterns In Repeat (Deluxe)
Label : Chrysalis Records
Lien : https://www.lauramarling.com/
Style : Folk
By adding a live recording to the Deluxe version of the album Patterns In Repeat, Laura Marling offers us transcended versions of her gentle, intimate folk, which gain a seductive breadth.
If having too many choices can destabilize children and adults alike, Laura Beatrice Marling has experienced the opposite. With a session musician father who owned his own studio and a music teacher mother, she was bound to embrace a musical career. She was introduced to music by playing folk guitar, but has mastered many other instruments, and will say herself that she knew how to sing before she knew how to speak. Her references include Neil Young, whose opening acts she supported in her youth, and Joni Mitchell. Her debut album was released in 2018 when she was just 18.
The Deluxe version of Patterns In Repeat, released less than a year ago, now includes a live recording of a concert at Manchester’s Albert Hall. The compositions on this album show just how deeply Laura Marling is steeped in music: for her, it’s not an artistic pursuit, but a way of being, of presenting herself to the world. Voice and guitar complement each other with confounding naturalness, the simplicity blending with the gentleness of the singer’s words, as she tells us what it was like for her to become a mother. A few strings and backing vocals remain sufficiently distant to underline the ethereal, almost floating quality of her lullabies.
Having two versions of the same tracks on the same disc allows us to compare two very different acoustics. Thus, the relative confinement of the studio will be much more obvious when compared to the live recording, which undeniably brings more emphasis and fills the soundstage differently, especially with large column speakers. In this context, the musicians’ playing shows greater fluidity, as if they had gained a freedom and spontaneity that they lacked in the studio. However, this is not apparent from listening to the first part alone, where, without knowing the live performance, the studio recording already sounds beautifully coherent.