Laura Marling is a particularly standoffish singer/songwriter, reserved in interviews and tauntingly prickly in song; a typical line, from A Creature I Don’t Know standout "Sophia", is "I never did say whatever it was you did that day." As she’s grown, she’s moved farther in this direction, away from the plain-spoken vulnerability of Alas, I Cannot Swim into vocals that curl words into secretive murmurs, and lyrics that tiptoe up to confessions then stop just short. Mythology and formal allusions swirl around even her candid moments, assuring that any autobiography is lost in the fog.
So it’s a mild shock to hear Marling sing "We shared an apartment on the Upper West Side" toward the beginning of her fifth record Short Movie. The lyric is rooted to a specific place, a specific happening in her life. It’s even a precise moment—2012’s post-Hurricane Sandy blackout, which left most of lower Manhattan without power and "dark, as if no one lives there," as she says on "False Hope". In interviews, Marling acknowledges Short Movie is more unguarded, though characteristically only to a point: "The arm’s distance was getting closer with this record for sure, but then I stopped," she told The Guardian, declining to elaborate.
In part, the new sense of openness comes from the sound. Short Movie is her first album written on electric guitar—specifically, her father’s old Gibson 335. It’s not a drastic change, as Marling’s uptempo tracks have always had muscle, but it’s palpable nevertheless. Marling toured Once I Was an Eagle with longtime cellist Ruth de Turberville (who contributes lovely arrangements on Short Movie) but little else in the way of a band or instrumentation, and on Short Movie, she clutches every guitar fill like it’s a long-lost piece of her identity, luxuriating in space and writing bigger and hazier songs to match.
The arrangement on "Warrior", for instance, is stranded atop a canyon of echo and given an arrangement so vast and dusty that Marling almost gets away with the America rip (yes, that one). "Warrior" is hauntingly serious, but elsewhere you can hear here loosening up: "Strange," a near-spoken disembowelment of a hapless cheating man, wouldn’t work without the cruelest hitch of a laugh in Marling’s voice as she informs him, "I don’t love you… I’m pretty sure that you know." It’s easily the standout: every syllable delivered like acid, and lyrics that continually walk up to the line and cross it—right up to "No, I do not believe we were born equally."
Short Movie has been called Marling’s "quarterlife crisis" album, but the crises she's grappling here are the same ones she's confronted her entire career: love as a threat to autonomy, suitors as perpetual disappointments, wariness of intimacy but also of the alternatives. Album opener "Warrior" is a mythological conceit typical of Marling—men as warriors, women as the steeds they misuse. Marling is the sort of artist to deliver "I feel your love" like it’s synonymous with fear, or choking gas; "Walk Alone" is the sound of a woman who’s sat with herself long enough to realize, horrified, that what she hears inside is a lonely-morning dirge.
This turns out to be Short Movie’s main, minor downfall: Most of these themes were explored, in more eviscerating detail, in Once I Was an Eagle, and the album meanders in the second half. Without an overarching conceit like Once I Was an Eagle, Short Movie comes off sounding like a transition record, a short movie in the sense that it’s a prelude to something bigger. But Marling’s career is remarkable in part because album after album she not only delivers on those bigger things, but delivers them in her idiosyncratic voice. She’s spent her entire career dodging comparisons, but by now she has earned the right to be compared only to herself.
