Marling’s new album focuses on women
It is a woman’s world on Laura Marling’s sixth album, “Semper Femina,” her latest set of cozy, folky melodies carrying profoundly enigmatic tidings.
The characters in her new songs, from start to finish, are women; men, except for someone’s mean father, are absent.
Yet her backup musicians and technicians on “Semper Femina” are men: most prominently, the album’s producer, Blake Mills, the guitarist who has lately worked with Alabama Shakes, Fiona Apple and John Legend.
Marling is a subtly virtuosic guitarist with a voice that’s pensive, consoling, poised and wise beyond her 27 years.
Her music is rooted in, among other things, English folk tradition and the acoustic-electric mesh of Southern California folk-pop from the late 1960s and early 1970s; she moved from England to Los Angeles in 2013.
The songs on “Semper Femina” use deceptively plainspoken vocabulary to conjure sometimescryptic relationships and events.
The album title echoes a line from Virgil’s “Aeneid”:
(“Fickle and changeable always is woman”).
Marling quotes the entire line, half in English, in a song called “Nouel,” addressed to a singer who “speaks a word, and it gently turns / to perfect metaphor.”
Her feelings are tangled, involving lost loves and lessons learned, connections and separations, hopes and shortcomings, memories and what-ifs.
In “Next Time,” it gradually emerges that the singer abandoned someone — “I feel her / I hear her weakly scream” — and remains burdened by conscience: “I don’t want to be the kind / Struck by fear to run and hide.”
Literary conceits melt in the intimacy of the music. Marling’s voice and acoustic guitar, and melodies that sound as if they had always existed, remain at the core of most songs. Yet the production isn’t confined to folky naturalism.
“The Valley,” a dreamy waltz that mulls jealousy, mourning and the nature of beauty, layers quiet guitar picking, vocal harmonies and stringsection arrangements into hypnotic undulations.
A ticking drum machine and electricguitar echoes of Led Zeppelin’s “Babe, I’m Gonna Leave You” — the quieter part — are the backdrop for “Don’t Pass Me By,” a more-or-less breakup song in which the singer wonders, “Can you love me if I put up a fight?”
Bare-bones drums, a counterpoint of plucked bass notes and a canopy of sustained strings open up space around Marling’s voice in “Soothing,” as she informs an unwelcome visitor, “You can’t come in / you don’t live here anymore” but adds, “I banish you with love.”
Marling doesn’t cast herself as heroine or victim, angel or avenger. She does something trickier. Clear-eyed, calmly determined and invitingly tuneful, she captures each situation in all its ambiguity.