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”.
Discussing the album’s inspirations in interviews, Marling has eschewed the venerable folky names that invariably get attached to her own in favour of talking about the author, surrealist painter and one-time lover of Max Ernst, Leonora Carrington. And Camille Claudel, who is better known as Rodin’s muse than for her own art. And about how her study of Rilke led her to Lou Andreas-Salomé, psychoanalyst, writer and intimate of Rilke, Nietzsche and Freud. You can hear the influence of their stories, and the questions they raise about the relationship between female creativity and the role of a muse, lurking on the songs Always This Way and Nouel. The latter also features a reference to Gustave Courbet’s 1866 painting L’Origine du Monde.
“Lately I’m wondering if all my pondering is taking up too much ground,” sings Marling, not unreasonably, on Always This Way. For every fan who thinks this kind of thing is marvellous evidence of the way a smart songwriter can open up wider artistic worlds for the listener – a grand tradition that includes discovering William Burroughs through David Bowie or Shelagh Delaney via Morrissey – there’s someone for whom the very thought of an album about the exploration of womanhood, haunted by a variety of early 20th-century psychoanalysts, sculptors and authors, with a title in Latin and references to French realist painting in the lyrics will cause an involuntary clenching of the sphincter.
But Marling needn’t have worried. If you know the background, one noticeable thing about Semper Femina is that she transforms some fairly recherche source material into instantly relatable songs. You’re not struck by a sense of dry conceptualising, more her way with a smart, witty lyric. Almost everyone has had a relationship like the one neatly surmised on the closing Nothing, Not Nearly: “a year where I didn’t smile once, not really”. Almost everyone knows a character like the one depicted with a kind of wry affection on Wild Once: “Does no one understand you? You are wild and I won’t forget it.”
“You want to get high?” she asks a potential lover on Wild Fire: it sounds like an invitation until she abruptly changes her tone. “You overcome those desires before you come to me.”
It’s not just the lyrics that are really strong. The bare bones of the songs – Marling’s vocal melodies and acoustic guitar picking – are uniformly great, the arrangements subtly inventive. There’s something hugely satisfying about the sound of Soothing – two basses playing lines that curl around each other, a gentle dusting of orchestration – and something enrapturing about The Valley, where the lyrical tossing and turning over a strained friendship is set against gentle, palliative strings. It all sounds incredibly accomplished, the work of someone who knows exactly what they want to achieve and how to achieve it.
The only thing that doesn’t sound assured is Marling’s accent, which goes back and forth across the Atlantic like the QE2. One minute it’s cut-glass English, the next it’s drawling Laurel Canyon. At one juncture, it even seems to head off for a short break in the West Country: “It feels like they tart us,” she sings on Next Time, by which she means “it feels like they taught us”. The affectations are jarring but obviously deliberate – someone as smart and self-possessed as Marling surely isn’t alternately singing like Joni Mitchell, a Mitford sister and one of the Wurzels by accident. But why she does so is an intriguing question. Is she playing characters? Adjusting her voice to suit the different musical backings? She art to tell us.
It’s a rare aspect of Semper Femina that feels obscure. The album ends with the sound of Marling apparently putting down her guitar and walking away from the microphone, out of the studio and into a garden, complete with birdsong in the background: there’s something punchy and confident about it, and something punchy and confident about Semper Femina as a whole, an album that’s as big on telling details as it is on big ideas.
