(More Alarming Records, released 10 Mar 2017)
Marling proved to be the joker in the nu-folk pack. Over the course of five albums, she has grown ever bolder and more idiosyncratic, graduating from the occasional tweeness of early material on to the beautiful, sombre song cycle that was 2013’s Once I Was An Eagle and the free, spacious sounds of her “American” album, 2015’s Short Movie. In the process, she’s proved to be by far the most interesting of her contemporaries. She’s definitely “for real”, in a way that some of the more commercial-minded of her old cohort maybe aren’t.
Or is she? The opening shots from this sixth album seemed clinical and calculated. Soothing was initially striking, but on reflection felt slightly overcooked, its brooding sensuality too deliberate. Wild Fire had almost the opposite problem, a simplistic strumalong she could have knocked out over breakfast.
Then there was the expectation set up for Semper Femina, through interviews and that title, that it was to be a conceptual epic, some grand statement about womanhood. In fact, the end product feels slim, clocking in at just nine songs. And if it is a take on femininity, then it’s not obviously more so than her other albums, which were always heavily reflective. It begins to look more like just a handy marketing package for a recent collection of songs. They certainly missed a trick not releasing it on International Women’s Day.
Fortunately, beyond the PR pitch and the radio fodder, the music turns some intriguing corners. On Don’t Pass Me By a reverb-heavy guitar gently weeps to a descending bassline, much like George Harrison’s did. Then the lonesome melodic twists she deploys so well come to the fore on Wild Once, the album’s most beguiling moment, on which she also uses that speak-singing she never seems 100% committed to. Closing track Nothing, Not Nearly pitches an acoustic guitar against a braying electric, before floating off on a sea of finger picked loveliness.
Lyrics like ‘I was wild once and I can’t forget it’ return to favourite themes. Remember when she had ‘been with the devil in the devil’s resting place’ back in 2013? And the comments she makes about her interlocutor’s mama and papa on Wild Fire hark back to when she was comparing herself to the grandmother and grandfather on I Was An Eagle. It’s this that makes it hard to buy in to the album-as-statement schtick, although the lyrics still offer introspective poetry to roll around in your head.
Semper Femina might sit in Marling’s canon like Nocturama sits in Nick Cave’s – a slighter album among more landmark ones, distinctively her, but also generically her, its best moments not enough to make it stand out. It’s good, because it’s Marling, and it’s good, because, like Cave, she strikes as the kind of artist who age and wisdom will bring even better out of.