CD Review: Laura Marling - When I Was An Eagle
For about one-and-a-half songs, Laura Marling's fourth album fails to convince, the lyrics just a little too knowing, the American accent, coming from a 23-year-old Berkshire girl, all too artificial...
Then, suddenly, as she hits the glorious middle section of the title track, the eagle shows its talons.
The five-song cycle that follows through You Know, Breathe and the sexy, thrashing Master Hunter, is raw, redemptive, elegantly spiteful.
A discordant, instrumental Interlude is a signal for a series of tracks no less intense but written in a dazzling array of styles, from the playful, American folk-rock of Undine to When You Were Happy (And How Long Has That Been), a song haunted, stylistically and lyrically, by Nick Drake.
The earthy restlessness of ...Eagle is more closely comparable not to other music but to a novel: Mary Webb's Gone To Earth. Like that violent, pastoral parable it is a minor masterpiece.
Verdict: 5/5