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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