Nominated for the Mercury Music Prize three times already, and winner of the BRITS award for Best British Female in 2011 (she has been nominated four times) and yet Ms Marling is still under-reported, under-recognised and under-appreciated. How can this be? Still in her 20s, Semper Femina is her sixth album, another great album in a career littered with greatness. Like, say, Joni Mitchell, her music’s simply too subtle at times, too nuanced to strike home within the mass mainstream. Her critical success hasn’t quite equated into commercial success, but I doubt she is complaining. In the big scheme of things she’s doing good.
Her 2015 album Short Movie was a significant departure from her previous work, a move away from the acoustic-folk-based work of her catalogue up to that point, and towards a stronger emphasis on an electric sound. Semper Femina is an extension of this new found musical freedom – aided by the spacious and yet intimate production of Blake Mills – although much of her music retains the stripped back acoustica that she is so obviously comfortable with. And recently she ventured into the world of podcasts, underlying her continued search for enlightenment and answers. Reversal of the Muse was a series of intimate explorations of gender and sexuality, with Marling interviewing female musicians (including Dolly Parton!) and those who engineer and are involved in production, the exercise sparked by her having only ever seen two female engineers in all her time in recording studios up and down the land.
Femininity has often been a central plank in her work. She had 'Semper Femina' tattooed on her leg when she was 21. Translated by her as ‘always a woman’, and seemingly subverted from the original phrase it was taken from (“Varium et mutabile semper femina,” which roughly translates as “A woman is an ever fickle and changeable thing," and is from Virgil, the ancient Roman poet) the album Semper Femina sees Marling delving further into her and other's femininity, and delivering a set of songs that, while questioning and fretting, sounds like an artist comfortably at ease with herself, as she always does on the surface. One who can take the particular and expand that out into the general, examining motives and mistakes in doing so. "I don’t need to pretend it’s a man to justify the intimacy of the way I’m looking and feeling about women," she has said about the album. "It’s me looking specifically at women and feeling great empathy towards them and by proxy towards myself.”
The electrification of Laura Marling, and her feminine/relationship explorations, is never more apparent than on the startling lead track 'Soothing', a song that features a video directed by Marling herself, a smokingly erotic affair that nevertheless is about overcoming lust; in this case, the advances of a former lover: "Oh, my hopeless wanderer, you can't come in, you don't live here anymore." The charged atmosphere is only further heightened by the underlying rhythm of the track, a close approximation of The Beatles' superficially salicious sounding 'Come Together'.
Heavily reverbed guitar plays a central role in the experiemental 'Don't Pass Me By', a strange and a little uneasy combo of lightly applied lo-fi programmed beats, a rising and vibrato guitar line and strings, in a manner a little reminiscent of some of the work on Nick Drake's Five Leaves Left. "You take my old guitar, the one I said was ours, don't be blue. You hum that old tune the one I used to sing for you," Marling sings in that slightly downbeat yet intimate fashion of hers, also reminiscent of the understated style of Drake. She then takes it down even further vocal wise with a particularly, if purposefully, lethargic performance on 'The Valley' – another song about a splintering relationship, this time between two women – in contrast to the fluid, ryhthmic and swelling strings. And on 'Wild Fire' there's some woozy, vaguely psyched-out reverbed electric guitar sitting behind the Dylan-meets-warm-Laurel Canyon rolling grooves, Marling's voice at her most beguiling, and also most expressive, and this time taking on some of the vibrato of a Chrissie Hynde. It's an album highlight, and indeed one of her very finest songs ever.
At times, Marling's on-record vocal personality can give the impression of someone a little icily detached. On 'Always This Way' she sings: "25 years, nothing to show for it, nothing of any weight / 25 more, will never learn from it, never learn from my mistakes". Despite the deeply depressing and sweeping nature of the sentiment, Marling has the ability to dampen the emotion, and stay well clear of over-wroughtness, one of pop music's less appealing traits. It's this subdued persona that she displays on other tracks here such as the folksy fingerpicked and looking back nostalgia of 'Wild Once', and the gently comforting ryhthms and child-like percussion of 'Next Time', a song about learning, and saying goodbye.
Closing track 'Nothing, Not Nearly' then combines fast-talking blues with distorted guitar strokes, Marling talking about love, another faltered relationship, her innate sadness yet stoic bearing cutting through: "We’ve not got long, you know, to bask in the afterglow / Once it’s gone it’s gone, love waits for no one", she sings, the song fading out on a wave of acoustic lovliness, the sound of a door closing and birdsong.
Conversely, such as on the aforementioned 'Wild Fire', she positively blossoms with emotion, as she also does on 'Nouel', where Marling on her finger picked own does more than a beautiful impression of a Joni Mitchell. And it's here where the title of the album appears, as well as part of the original sentence it was taken from: “Fickle and changeable, weighing down on me.” Always a woman she will ever be. Always very interesting too, and always capable of producing such raw yet luxuriating music, despite or becasue of her ongoing search for answers and emotional fulfillment. But the answer is within her. As she sings on 'Wild Fire': "You always say you love me most, when I don't know I'm being seen."
Jeff Hemmings