Review: Laura Marling—Patterns in Repeat (2024)
Review: Laura Marling—Patterns in Repeat (2024)
Some artists stay with you for a lifetime. British contemporary folk artist Laura Marling is exactly three years older than I am and has been writing since she was just fourteen. This has meant that she has paved the path ahead of me, acting almost like an older sister-figure for most of my life. She penned breakup songs to soundtrack my first heartbreaks, shared tales of living alone in a big city when I first moved out, and questioned her femininity as I came to terms with womanhood.
However, since her 2008 debut, Alas, I Cannot Swim, there has always been a beguiling veil behind which she hides. A view of her true self is skewed by mythological imagery, imagined narratives, and characters enlisted to unravel philosophical knots encountered on her journey. These devices, for the most part, fall away on her latest album, Patterns in Repeat, which introduces the singer in a new light.
This shift toward the personal was first indicated on her almost prophetic seventh album, Song For Our Daughter. Marling now marks a milestone with Patterns in Repeat, which is undoubtedly her most personal work to date.
The record opens with ambient sounds: a sunlit morning, a toddler’s cooing, an open tuning. An open door invites the listener into Laura’s world.
This is not an imagined invitation. Written in the early months of her daughter’s life, these songs were recorded in stolen moments between nap and play times in Marling’s own home. During these spells, the child would often sit at her feet, providing ambient babbling and ensuring hushed, lullaby-like vocals from Laura herself.
Motherhood serves as an overarching theme, as titles like Child of Mine suggest, but there is always a wider context in which Marling operates. Though with a more optimistic air than in previous work, Laura picks apart the world around her. Recurring patterns, the repetitive nature of domesticity, and the cyclical nature of life are all laid out to be inspected.
Opening track Child of Mine, has a heavenly air to it. Choral vocals and swelling strings lift the melody as Laura assures her daughter that she has “spoken to the angels who’ll protect” her. There is a sense of time stretching and slowing, as drawn-out vowels and strings rise under the refrain “long nights, short years.”
Songs such as Patterns showcase intricate finger-picking, and serve as a culmination of years spent striving for musical mastery inspired for decades by the likes of Dylan, Young, and Mitchell. The track ends in birdsong and features echoing vocals that swirl in repetition to create an aural kaleidoscope, a feature that may have seemed on-the-nose had it not been embedded in such subtle production and skillful songwriting.
The sonic palette is in dreamy soft focus, with delicate guitar and notably absent percussion, but Marling’s razor-sharp lyrics and attention to detail prevail as ever. She paints fine-point portraits of women who have gone before her, such as a relative whose legacy is represented by her “family nose,” “dirty underwear,” and “diamond ring.”
A standout track is the nostalgic Caroline, which could sit neatly into the world of Tom Waits’ Martha. The narrator tries to recall a long-gone lover like a forgotten melody that goes “la la la la, something something, Caroline.” There is a simplicity to these songs that lends itself to honesty, clarity, and the basic truths that exist in the world.
This simplicity does not result in a lack of diversity, though, as we are sometimes thrown a curveball lyric like “life is slowing down, but it’s still bitchin’,” or surprised by the playfully quirky Interlude which brings the first side of the record to a close, snapping the stretching sense of pace in previous tracks back to real time.
It would be remiss to ignore the fact that this album is full of love songs, a somewhat untrodden ground for Marling. Romantic love blossoms in No One’s Gonna Love You Like I Can; a loved one is mourned with Your Love; and, of course, familial love features throughout. Each song is presented in a touchingly personal manner, delivering unique takes on universal feelings. As Laura herself sings, “No one’s ever put it quite that way.”
She has a talent for setting a scene, bringing the listener into a moment that is already underway. The song No One’s Gonna Love You opens with the line "You were taking off your clothes in a bar by the road.” No further context is given. We are simply allowed to step into this roadside bar where she marvels at her partner and ponders love and life.
A particularly touching moment comes in the form of Looking Back, a song Marling’s father penned fifty years prior to this album about making peace with life’s end. Nestled between songs for her daughter and partner, it is not just a thematic fit, but a real link in Marling’s own life pattern.
The album comes to a satisfying full-circle end with Patterns in Repeat, a reconstruction of earlier track Patterns, and a soothing instrumental version of Lullaby that leaves us in a serene state. A testament to Marling’s skills as a master of her craft, this delicate album goes to show that no bells or whistles are needed to make her remarkable songwriting shine.
On first listen, a strange feeling crept over me. Fifteen years and eight albums into her career, Laura and I reach an interesting fork in our road. For the first time, we have fallen out of step. Hearing a longtime companion gush about blissful love and domesticity is gorgeous, of course, but I also feel… strangely left behind.
Sinking into the warm, golden atmosphere captured on Patterns in Repeat, though, it is easy to feel reassured that what is to come - or not to come - needn’t be scary. Laura sounds happy. Each song is like a postcard from an old friend. There is a hopefulness in the fact that this once stoic and cynical sixteen-year-old has matured into a buttery-soft romantic in her old (but still young) age. It happens to the best of us, apparently.