Laura Marling
Patterns In Repeat
★★★★
PARTISAN/CHRYSALIS
After the 2023 birth of her daughter, Laura Marling – whose stunning and stark 2020 album Song For Our Daughter was written long before she was a parent – found herself with unexpected time. She’d watch the sleeping kid and play guitar, surveying her flood of feelings and realisations in songs she recorded at home, largely alone.
Over the course of Patterns In Repeat, we hear her become a mother and musician in real time, baby babbling as Marling laughs while taking hesitant strums during opener Child Of Mine. It is a sharp and tender document of dawning domesticity, Marling realising dual roles as guardian and observer above a chorus of astonished oohs and ahhs. Magnificently paced and candid, these 11 songs surface self-doubt and self-assurance as Marling learns to let parts of herself go. “I want you to know that I gave it up willingly,” she sings of her own life at the album’s arresting climax, pledging herself in this brilliant entry into public parenting.
Patterns In Repeat is out October 25 on Partisan/Chrysalis.
ORDER: Amazon | Rough Trade | HMV
Tracklisting:
Child Of Mine
Patterns
Your Girl
No One's Gonna Love You Like I Can
The Shadows
Interlude (Time Passages)
Caroline
Looking Back
Lullaby
Patterns In Repeat
Lullaby (Instrumental)
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