Laura Marling - Semper Femina

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The folk star is back with a set of erudite but instantly relatable musings on femininity, art and relationships

Laura Marling’s sixth album is not a record much interested in wearing its intelligence lightly. A concept album about femininity and female relationships (or “an exploration of womanhood”, as one magazine put it, making it sound like something that worthy Channel 4 would have broadcast in the early 80s), it starts quoting Virgil at you before a note is struck: the Latin title is a bowdlerised line from the Aeneid, which edits a dire warning from the god Mercury that: “Woman is always fickle and changeable” into the more positive slogan: “Always a woman”.

Related: Laura Marling: 'I had no identity. I was socially bankrupt'

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The first hint of what shape that understanding might take came with the lead single ‘Soothing'. The song also opens the album, but all-in-all it’s a bit of a red herring. It’s a super sexy track of minimalist rhythms, and Marling’s most seductive vocal to date. The release was accompanied by a fittingly sultry self-directed video featuring two latex clad women writhing around in bed. Musically, there’s a slightly foreboding quality to languid bass, and the tense flicks of electric guitar. Lyrically, Marling plants a slightly sinister air amongst the lush sensuality: “Oh, some creepy conjurer/Who touched the rim/Whose hands are in the door/I need soothing/My lips aren't moving/My God is brooding” successfully flipping expectation.

Alas, this didn’t herald the beginning of her Prince phase, as the rest of the record slips into more traditional Marling territory. That’s not to say she takes a regressive step back after the shift in style of Short Movie, instead, she sharpens and delves deeper into her already superb songwriting abilities. Vocally she continues to mature and explore what her voice is capable of. Whereas she exploits a gossamer smooth turn on ‘Soothing,’ ‘Wild Once’ finds her inhabiting a new character through clipped English intonation. The ever-so-slightly posh inflection apparent when she sings, “I was wild once” is wryly incongruous.

Equally on ‘Don’t Pass Me By’ the robotic drum machine and metallic sounding electric guitar feels distant and in distinct opposition to Marling’s lilt towards a deeper, richer and earthier singing style. And the song makes a winning melodic twist halfway through that has echoes of Dusty Springfield. But it’s ‘The Valley’ that finds her at her captivating best. Sublime rising strings match this touching tale of an enigmatic woman that is a source of fascination and feeling for Marling. It’s nigh on impossible not to be as moved, as she clearly is, when she sings, “Longing to ask her what she’s mourning, cuz I know it can’t be spoke/perhaps she’s had too much of love/can be a sickly thing”. The mysterious character charms her and is the subject of her affection: “I know she’s down there in the valley I can see her golden hair/I love you in the morning my angel of the west/I love you in the evening and I will do my very best”. It’s an example the kind of pure and unselfconscious songwriting that finds Marling at her best and potent as a songwriter.

From time to time the record touches on a slightly more political edge in this exploration of gender. Whereas ‘The Valley’ is an ode to the enchanting ambiguities of a woman, ‘Nouel’ charts the limitations imposed on them: “She’d like to be the kind of free that women still can’t be alone… a thousand artists’ muse, but you will be anything you choose”. But Nouel is an inspiration for Marling, and in that she puts forward the idea that with positive role models these limitations can be reversed: “Fickle and changeable weighing down on me/she speaks a word and it gently turns to perfect metaphor/she likes to say ‘I only play when I know what I'm playing for’".

Sometimes you’d like her to make the kind of extreme shift that is so often suggested before each new release. But as Short Movie was no less rewarding for the overstated ‘she’s gone electric’ rhetoric, this record succeeds on its own terms. As an exploratory work of her own gender, some might expect a kind of direct feminist treaty in Semper Femina - but they are likely to be disappointed. As she says, it’s her attempt to understand femininity, and that occurs here in poetic and often quite abstract fashion. Evidently, for Marling, femininity is less fickle and changeable than mesmerisingly mysterious.

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“Twenty-five years/ Nothing to show for it,” sings Laura Marling on Always This Way, continuing the theme of the quarter-life crisis begun on 2015’s fine Short Movie. Marling’s sixth album chafes against the sexist assumptions of Virgil (women are always fickle, goes the full quote of the title) but she gets the tattoo anyway; obviously, Marling also reserves the right to change her mind. There’s a new slinkiness to some of these songs, not least lead track Soothing and its latex-themed video. But the overarching theme is of perspectives – male, female and in-between – and female relationships. Nouel pledges Marling’s service to a muse; The Valley is a languorous song about an inscrutable woman singer whom Marling is trying to figure out. “We love beauty because it needs us to,” she concludes.

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Laura Marling has used conversations surrounding her sixth album, Semper Femina, to disavow music of “innocent creativity”—the kind that’s “not pointed, not political,” she says. It’s an intuitive concept that sounds relatively novel coming from this folk songwriter. In the late 2000s, Marling emerged from London’s Communion scene, a coterie of authenticity fetishists who wore wounded hearts on tweed-jacket sleeves. Marling was herself embroiled in “innocent creativity,” but she released masterpieces of the form. Her identity evolved from romantic pragmatist to underdog sage to mystic troubadour; her voice became distant and supercilious, baring just enough soul to reassure you one was there. Radical honesty is now common among young songwriters, but Marling can harbor guilt, fear, arrogance, deceit, or triumph in a bottomless deadpan. It’s easy to invest in her evasion.

Semper Femina—Latin for “Always a woman,” and taken from Virgil’s epic poem The Aeneid—is no revolutionary screed. But the album’s characters, who are all given female pronouns, tiptoe outside Marling’s world of heartbreak and personal redemption. There are signs of a broader project at play. With lyrics about “warning signs” that we’re conditioned to “ignore diligently,” “Next Time” appears to preach a maternal fondness for Mother Earth: “I can no longer close my eyes/While the world around me dies/At the hands/Of folks/Like me,” she trills. While her composure hasn’t wavered since 2010’s I Speak Because I Can, there’s something new in songs like “Next Time” and “Don’t Pass Me By.” Both remind me, in their reserve and understated melancholy, of mid-career Elliott Smith—a chaotic and vulnerable individual anchored by a preternatural understanding of melody, using compassion to navigate horror.

As Semper Femina’s questions deepen, answers rarely materialize. The gorgeous “Always This Way” mourns a friendship cut short in unexplained circumstances. As sorrow triggers a bout of soul-searching, Marling confesses, “Twenty-five years and nothing to show for it/Nothing of any weight.” Over pastoral guitar twirls, the narrator soothes herself with a mantra, though not a satisfying one: “At least I can say/That my debts have been paid.” The conciliation feels a little flimsy. A songwriter as meticulous as Marling doesn’t need to innovate, but she’s most intriguing on songs like “Soothing,” when her cryptic lyrics snowball without scrambling for narrative closure.

“Soothing” is also the record’s only really ambitious composition. Interlocked basslines quarrel under Marling’s magisterial tones. Its image of a “creepy conjurer” whose “hands are in the door” hangs elegantly unresolved. She sings her sendoff—“I banish you with love”—through luscious minor notes that, instead of sugarcoating the rejection, transfigure it. Banishment becomes liberation, a generous act. The philosophy develops on “Wild Fire”: “There no sweeter deed may be,” she sings, “Than to love something enough/To want to help it get free.” As is Marling’s trademark, the line blossoms as both a revelation—the narrator takes pleasure in her wisdom—and a reprimand to a clingy partner, someone unsuited to her passionate independence.

Where Semper Femina might have sketched a feminist utopia, Marling instead uses her broad study of femininity to explore flawed, sometimes devastating relationships between women. The full Virgil quote—“A woman is an ever fickle and changeable thing”—could seem patronizing, but Marling quotes it fondly on “Nouel.” She is tirelessly nuanced, and the result is an album filled with beautiful, searching observations on the psychology of friendship and occasionally romance. “I think your mama’s kinda sad/And your papa’s kinda mean,” she sneers on “Wild Fire.” “I can take that all away/You can stop playing it out on me.” Marling proposes here that love is a defense against our parents’ pathologies—yet she acknowledges that the traits we inherit are stubborn, determined to sneak in and mangle beauty. It’s a fitting parallel to how Marling wrestles with, and masters, her ever more malleable folk idiom.