Semper Femina

while Silent Movie felt like a minor departure, this record still manages to sound deeply connected to its predecessors.

It all adds up to the most serene, stylistically varied album Marling has ever created.

When pondering gets this skilled, and this fruitful, the dividends far outweigh the misgivings.

While Marling's lyrics come across as powerful and worldly, it's the conversational tone that makes Semper Femina work so well.

With Eagle already standing as one of the peaks of modern folk music, we would not necessarily have expected to hear another knockout record from her, but there’s no denying Semper Femina stands toe-to-toe with her opus.

Semper Femina matches Laura Marling’s personal quest to unlock facets of her identity echoing with the wider struggle to clear a space for the feminine voice within society itself. With a triumphant new album it seems that this songwriter has found a room of her own.

he has created an album of songs whose sounds and sentiments are much weightier than they appear on the surface, providing entry to somewhere much more wondrous and strange and troubling than it first appears. Semper Femina is a ticket for such a journey, one that provides practical insights but no easy answers.

Semper Femina does not reach the soaring intensity and edged elation of Once I Was an Eagle, nor does it carry almost any of the freaked-out electricity that propelled Short Movie and allowed it to stand as a worthy successor to Eagle. But it is a strong, elegant, and self-assured album that, in its creative arrangements and lyrical world building, contains remarkable complexity and depth in terms of both skill and concept.

It is another gem in an already glittering canon.

Marling wanders and wonders what it’s all about. Her journey enriches us all.

In all, Semper Femina is powerful display of Marling's craft and, the album's driving force, love.

There’s a new slinkiness to some of these songs.

Laura Marling crafts yet another hard-to-pin, experimental, statement. A shape-shifting artist who never pauses, the record patters quietly away in a flurry of footsteps and birdsong, as the elusive morning finally arrives.

There's always more to Marling than the uninitiated might hear at first, and Semper Femina is yet another astounding testament to her talent and the multitudes therein.

Having entered the limelight early, the 27-year-old singer/songwriter has now settled into a comfortable groove to on this finely honed career highlight.

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.

You’re not struck by a sense of dry conceptualising, more her way with a smart, witty lyric.

Ms. Marling doesn’t cast herself as heroine or victim, angel or avenger. She does something trickier, and perhaps braver. Clear-eyed, calmly determined and invitingly tuneful, she captures each situation in all its ambiguity.

Semper Femina is a concise, dynamic statement from the English singer-songwriter, mixing breezy 70’s country-rock melodies with claustrophobic, fingerpicking folk, often on the same song.

Even though it’s a short record in terms of both duration and the number of tracks, this is very much a kaleidoscopic work, examining what it is to be a woman from a variety of cleverly-realised access points.

Semper Femina continues her decade-long hot streak with another collection of finely wrought vignettes on love, loss, and the empowerment that can be found in both.

With Semper Femina, Marling is back on more assured ground, largely acoustic, with subtle arrangements and an exquisite use of strings that seem a natural, wholly fitting addition to her ever-expanding palette.

An impressive deepening of Marling's explorations, and a timely testament to change as a positive force. [Apr 2017, p.24]

It is a joy to hear. [Apr 2017, p.113]

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.

“Soothing” sounds legitimately fresh in a way very little new music does, and while it carries inescapable echoes of other artists (the bass line reminds me of peak career Tom Waits), the overall impression is that Laura Marling is paving new ground in her brand of folk music. Unfortunately--you knew there was going to be an “unfortunately”--there are only small glimpses of that innovation on the rest of the album.

Her own voice just grows stronger, literally and figuratively: On "Wild Fire," advising a lover or frenemy to "stop playing that shit out on me," she's a wordy folk-soul queen of entirely her own making.

The result is an album that seeks to push folk's innate naturalism into an even more progressive space, eschewing any trace of outmoded roles and stereotypes. In doing so, Semper Femina never feels strained or disingenuous, the effortless antithesis to the studied, conservative posing of so much modern folk.

The lack of anything that’s decidedly uptempo may be a detriment to some, but the blend of strings and acoustic instrumentation more than compensates for the subdued stance.