Review Summary: A gorgeously dark but still varied folk-pop album, it’s hard to not fall in love with just about everything offered here.
Its no secret that the main inspiration for
I Speak Because I Can is Laura Marling’s breakup with her London folk counterparts Noah and the Whale, and the subsequent breakup between her and their frontman, Charlie Fink. Even without that information, it’s not hard to deduce from the lyrical themes, as well as the overall sound, that not everything is right in Laura Marling’s world.
A majority of this album is decidedly dark, subdued vocals and instruments are a common occurrence, and more then a few of the lyrics suit this. There are (relatively) upbeat tracks, like “Darkness Descends” (the irony is not lost, believe me), but they’re not the centrepiece here. Take “He Wrote” for example, which speaks of how Laura left someone and is now with a better man. No names are ever mentioned, but it’s not difficult to reason that the man she left is Charlie Fink, and the man she’s with is Marcus Mumford, who also happens to contribute backing vocals on several tracks. Instrumentally the song is stripped down, like most folk music, with only a lightly picked guitar and some ghostly backing vocals for accompaniment.
Of course, mention must be made of Marling’s vocal style. Though she’ll tend to get boxed in with the other alternative pop singers (Alanis Morissette, or Regina Spektor for instance) she does have her own style, with the best - but still unfortunately crude - way of explaining it being simply to call her Spektor in about 10 or 20 years time. Marling is also quite versatile, proudly displaying her falsetto range on “Goodbye England (Covered In Snow)”. Her conviction is another thing to be lauded, producing a few heart-wrenching moments, such as when she peaks at the end of “Made by Maid” (“Forgive me, I am only a maid”), and one verse in the aforementioned, “Goodbye England” that displays her confusion beautifully (“I’m clearing all the crap out of my room, trying desperately to figure out what it is that makes me blue”).
Elsewhere on the album, there are times of triumph (“Devil’s Spoke”), oddly uplifting tunes (“Darkness Descends”) and several rousing tunes, like “Hope In The Air”. Each of those prevent any kind of monotony from seeping in, particularly “Hope In The Air”, which sits right after the endearingly optimistic “Goodbye England”. Its that kind of variety that really brings
I Speak Because I Can to life and stops it being the drab sob-fest it could have been. Yes it’s a dark album, but it doesn’t wallow in that for its entire run-time. It’s a mature and reasoned release, a fact that pushes this album to great heights even when it’s downcast.
