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Short Movie – Laura Marling goes Electric

By: Kevin (@Prufesuroak)

Short Movie is the new album released by British anti-folk artist Laura Marling. The album came out on March 20, 2015.

Laura Marling’s new album Short Movie came out of a 6 month break from music that Marling took after an attempt to put out a record she was dissatisfied with. Marling has been pretty consistent since the start of her career, after leaving Noah and the Whale, Marling has released 5 studio albums since her departure from the band in 2008.

Short Movie kicks off with “Warrior” which has this very somber, gloomy, dusty, echo-y western sound with this hovering vocal and all to its benefit. The song tells the story of a horse’s relationship with this lone warrior who fails to follow through. All told from the horse’s perspective.

The album though is a more punchy and gritty than what we’ve heard from Marling in the past. “False Hope” brings a more electric, ringy and spacey guitar work from Marling. Though it is a harder hitting album, it doesn’t sound heavy, and it’s got this buoyancy to it. “Is it still OK that I don’t know how to be alone?” Marling sings.

In “I Feel Your Love” Marling sings “You must let me go before I get old, I need to find someone who really wants to be mine”. She sings about an overprotective and controlling lover. In “Strange” Marling sings “I don’t love you, I’m sure you know”, and it is as blunt as it gets, which she does well.

The album is Marling’s most personal, transparent and raw I’ve heard Marling. And perhaps going electric brought this out of her. Going electric is quite usually a frowned upon phase to drive any folk musician, back when Dylan went electric everyone freaked out, but it seems to be a natural progression to most folk artists nowadays. But for Marling, who’s armed with her father’s 335, it totally pays off.

Short Movie came out of a break Marling took after feeling exhausted from her career. Marling said in an interview ““I became suddenly aware of the crushingly high-structured environment which I lived in, one record after the other”. This break spawned the album, after moving to California, leaving England. The album brings out a grittier side that Marling never shared, the album is riddled with very American things like deserts and canyons. Overall this is a great album from Marling.