Laura Marling’s Patterns In Repeat is an intimate album that conjures the magic touch of 70s iconic artists like Peter Hammill, Kate Bush, Roy Harper, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, Judee Sill, and Sandy Denny, who carved intensely personal music into still memorable vinyl grooves.
Emotions run through the pulse of Laura’s music as she once said, “I Speak Because I Can”. In ‘Take The Night Off’ she is adamant with the words, “You should be gone/Be gone from me”. As an artist, she declared, “Semper Femina”. She fictionalized a future daughter with the words, “So you wished for a kiss from god”. And now, in the softest featherbed of her new album, Patterns In Repeat, she celebrates that reality with tunes that caress and cradle the melody of her newborn child.
Of course, ‘Child Of Mine’ begins with her baby’s voice, introducing a quiet lullaby with heavenly haloed backing voices and sympathetic strings. American Transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “Beauty is its own excuse for being”. The song is something like that.
There are more contented and contemplative thoughts. ‘Patterns’ has a joyous acoustic guitar, more sainted voices, swelled strings, and a gorgeous melody. Roy Harper’s ‘Forever’, with the words, “We’re just spinning leaves in the flight of dawn, little girl”, touches the same immense thought of generational time with the “patterns in repeat” that are “forevermore”. Then, ‘Your Girl’ is a deep psychological glance at intense poetic harvest love. And this is followed by the bare-knuckled naked ‘No One’s Gonna Love You Like I Can’, a promised spectral prayer that oozes with John Keats’s poetic proclamation that “beauty is truth and truth is beauty” transcendence.
In contrast, ‘The Shadows’ gently touches a dark psychologically projected liturgy with the words, “She’s leaving my altar”, and “I knew, of course I knew/That one day she’d tear me apart”. While this tune does not plummet the depths of Richard Thompson’s ‘The End Of The Rainbow’ or Peter Hammill’s ‘Betrayed,’ it does inject LM’s usual artistic literary depth. This tune, with its mention of “Shadows you left on my heart”, is far from any Hallmark cliched lullaby.
My friend, Kilda Defnut, says, “The song is a secular sun dancing in Fatima’s sacred prophetic mystery”.
Odd: ‘Interlude (Time Passages)’ has an electronic pulse that conjures the sound of her always interesting alter-ego band, Lump, recorded with Mike Lindsay.
Then, there’s soft redemption. ‘Caroline’ (with more heavenly strings!) moves the album beyond the moment and imagines, to quote the great Michael Chapman, “Time past and time passing.” Indeed, this album, with its caress and cradle melodies, still sings Laura’s “reckoning with the ideas and behavior we endure through family over generations.” And it’s excellent 70s singer-songwriter stuff, to boot! Ditto for the reflective ‘Looking Back’ with its soft, sad, and gossamer-laced pensive soliloquy.
The appropriate ‘Lullaby’ returns to universal love with that featherbed swelled string comfort, but then morphs into the title track, ‘Patterns In Repeat’, recalling the poetic “blue” soul of Joni Mitchell with its ethereal melody, generously dramatic strings, and lyrics that photograph impressionistic thoughtful revere. And, the acoustic reprise of ‘Lullaby’ lands the album with a soft parachuted final inner and lovely introspective groove, that still, even though all these years, after confessing, “Alas, I Cannot Swim”, now loves, with the deepest of melodies, her “child of mine’, while “You and your dad are dancing in the kitchen”.
Indeed, great music is quite often danced in the kitchen.
Bill Golembeski
Artist’s website: https://www.lauramarling.com/
‘Caroline’ – official video:
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