Album review: in praise of Laura Marling's Once I Was An Eagle

Laura Marling, Once I Was An Eagle

Released 27 May 2013, Virgin

Experiencing Once I Was An Eagle is less like listening to an album and more like walking before an epic tableaux, tracing its narrative and absorbing yourself in its intricate threads. The tracks are not individuated, autonomous entities but run into each other in an inexorable story that the teller is fated to tell and the listener is compelled to hear. From the wilderness of the lurking beast and the eagle and dove's eternal fight, through the fierce cry of the master hunter, to the gentle damsel by the shore and the hoped for contentment of a happy ending, the album tells its epic with heartfelt truthfulness and musical virtuosity.

Marling’s vocal control is phenomenal. Her vibrato on the title track ‘Once I Was An Eagle’ undulates like lush hills, trailing off into a valley of silence with the held note of the violin running through it like a stream, while each perfect vocal glissando of her chorus is a trickle of water spilling over the rocks into little pools of exquisite sound. And the themes of her album are similarly metaphorised in the beauty of the natural landscape and the elusive complexity of the humans who inhabit it. With every meticulous nuance of her voice she captures this complexity, expressing overwhelming power, consuming compassion and every emotion in between.

The music itself is a genre-defying mixture of country, folk, bluegrass, classical guitar that borders on flamenco and Fantasia-esque film music. She employs unusual tunings and instruments including organs, lap steels and pipes to enhance her skilful guitar riffs. Those riffs become motifs that transmute and tie together the threads of the life she weaves, perfectly marrying with the progress of the narrative. In ‘When Were You Happy? (And How Long Has That Been)’ she sings ‘The more I think the harder I breathe’ – that may be true, but the unique sounds and ingeniously expressed thoughts of this album are a breath of fresh air for the listener.

Marling dazzled with her entrance onto the music scene at the age of 18 with the delicate debut album Alas I Cannot Swim (2008). She has since turned that precocious youth into a self-possessed maturity, accepting that it is impossible to ‘know what it is you don’t know’. Her most recent album, A Creature I Don’t Know (2011), is full of her characteristic innovation and ingenuity but the power of her emotional, musical and lyrical hooks was slightly lost in complex obscurity. Now, she has combined the lot to produce a unique musical perspective on the world that is at once virtuosic and eminently accessible.

Marling has always had great literary sensibilities – her prevalent bird metaphors allude to Shelley’s skylark whose ‘sweetest songs sing of saddest thought’. But for Marling, birdsong is a reminder of the transience and pain of life not because the birds are unaware of this but because the birds, as in ‘Love Be Brave’, ‘suffer so; do they sing because they know this life don’t go slow?’ Marling’s music does something similar – it doesn’t shy away from the pain of life but makes it into something beautiful. It is a music in which you can dissolve yourself, fade far away and quite forget the world around you while sharing Marling’s ‘pleasure pain’ as if it is, exquisitely, your own.

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Hush, listen... Exploring the power of sound at the National Theatre

The Hush

The Shed, National Theatre, until 3 August

What is the true power of sound? What can it make you feel, remember, believe or hope for? This is the question asked by pioneering electronic music producer Matthew Herbert in his first foray into the theatrical world. We all know that a particular smell or a particular song can immediately transport you to a previous time or place, but if you isolate ambient noise and focus in on that, what kind of sonic journey can that take you on? And how can this help us appreciate the world we live in?

Herbert, together with NT associate director Ben Power, has created an avant-garde piece of theatre in which sound becomes a character, engaging with the actors, eliciting emotion and responding to and shaping the dialogue. Two foley artists stand on a balcony above the set, creating a variety of subtle sounds with which the performers, Tobias Menzies and Susannah Wise, interact below. From purposeful footsteps falling on a tray of gravel to a lapping lake conjured by hands splashing in a glass tank, they provide a soundtrack to Tobias and Susannah’s past and potentially future lives. This aural illusion is conjured within an apparent sound studio, that may also be a kind of therapy centre, or perhaps a futuristic facility to which people can come to recreate happy memories from a bank of sounds that has been preserved in an otherwise dystopian world. Herbert lets you come to your own conclusions.

The beauty of having the foley live on stage is that you are torn between watching the passions of the actors and the actions of the sound-makers. Its presence makes every moment feel enhanced and vividly realised, yet somehow also artificial, laden with the irony that none of what the characters experience is real. There is a distinct sense of pathos throughout the whole piece, precisely because of this dialectic between the invocation of desired memories and the production of actual sounds. Because these are made with the most mundane of objects, they simultaneously create and confound the fantasy.

Herbert seems to be examining the future of our fractured world – these soundbites, however accurately crafted, can never come together to be an enduring, meaningful, tangible whole. Are we destined to remember our perceived halcyon days by trying vainly to record, sample, index and replay every single decibel of sound, every byte of data? In these days of virtual realities and cyber socialising, should we instead be trying to experience life in reality and not expect every sense to be at our fingertips whenever we click our fingers, or a button? You can go and see The Hush and ask yourself these questions. And you can also experience it on a purely sensory level, appreciating the technical prowess of those who manipulate sound and valuing the sonic experience in a way you may never have before. It’s worth going along with open ears just for that.

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News article: JK Rowling publishes novel under pseudonym

So it seems JK Rowling doesn't need that touch of Harry Potter magic to sell books. She may have written the most successful series of all time, but she is also the author of a noteworthy novel published under the pen name of Robert Galbraith. The Cuckoo's Calling is, tellingly, a bestseller without the readers' knowledge of its true author. When it was published in April this year, The Times Saturday Review said that Galbraith 'delivers sparkling dialogue and a convincing portrayal of the emptiness of wealth and glamour', and the author has achieved the accolade of comparisons with prestigious crime writers Ruth Rendall and PD James.

The book follows war veteran and private investigator Cormoran Strike as he begins interrogating a model's suicide and gets quickly immersed in an enigmatic world of crime and secrecy. It was The Sunday Times that identified The Cuckoo’s Calling as an unusually assured debut novel and decided to investigate its authorship. Upon discovery, Rowling told them: 'being Robert Galbraith has been such a liberating experience. It has been wonderful to publish without hype and expectation and pure pleasure to get feedback under a different name.'

Alas that she is now doomed to the same relentless judgment and critical scrutiny that was inflicted upon her when she released The Casual Vacancy, to a mixed reception, last year. That was by no means a flawless book (see my review here) but did not deserve the ferocious vilification it received from Jan Moir in The Daily Mail and others. The Cuckoo’s Calling is now likely to receive similar levels of attention. It has currently sold over 1,500 copies in hardback, a very respectable amount for an unknown author that would place it at around 30^th on the bestseller list; and of course, sales will now skyrocket with the breaking news of its true authorship.

On publisher Little Brown’s website, The Cuckoo’s Calling is listed as the beginning of a unique series of mysteries - the question is, will that series be thwarted by this discovery, or will it become a Harry Potter for grown-ups in the way The Casual Vacancy never could?

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PS I particularly like this review of The Cuckoo's Calling - it reads as if it could just as easily be about Harry Potter, complete with pun...

'Laden with plenty of twists and distractions, this debut ensures that readers will be puzzled and totally engrossed for quite a spell' (Library Journal)