Album Review: Laura Marling, ‘Patterns in Repeat’
Repetition lies at the heart of our lives: patterns blossom and fade, reminding us of the cycles of life through which our family members have passed and through which we and future generations will also pass. Laura Marling’s airy and spacious Patterns in Repeat gently meditates on the cyclical character of life: the persistent departures and returns that animate our relationships.
Many of the songs on the album are spare arrangements, with Marling’s vocals floating over her guitar strums, but they often swell with ethereal harmonies that float with a spectral beauty over the song’s rhythmic patterns. The album opens with the dazzling “Child of Mine,” Marling’s ode to the birth of her daughter; the swirling sonic spaciousness, with its heavenly choruses, evokes intimate, idyllic moments among mother, daughter, and father as they treasure one another so as not to miss a single moment that passes among them. Twirling strings mimic the dancing patterns of a ballerina on “Patterns,” movements that also lead backward and forward, backward and forward in the ballet of life. In “Your Girl,” sparkling life struggles against melancholy and regret in the plainspoken paean to the promise of enduring love and hope woven into the fabric of loss. On the lilting “No One’s Gonna Love You Like I Can,” Marling cleverly carries us through several phases of relationships with three lines: “no one’s gonna know you like I can,” “no one’s gonna say it like you say,” “no one’s gonna love you like I can.” Gentle and rhapsodic, “Lullaby” wraps around us and comfort us like the mother wrapping her child in her arms in the song. Marling reprises “Lullaby” as an instrumental to quite fittingly close the album.
Patterns in Repeat, Marling’s eighth studio album and a kind of follow up to 2020’s Song for Our Daughter, showcases Marling’s translucent vocals—she often resembles Joni Mitchell in the ways she shapes the melody of a song through her modulations—and her evocatively intimate lyrics.
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Patterns in Repeat is available HERE
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