Review: Laura Marling – I Speak Because I Can

Laura Marling: I Speak Because I Can (Virgin Records, 2010)

I loved Laura Marling’s debut album Alas I Cannot Swim, but unfortunately she has gotten better since those days. This is obviously an idiotic statement, but in a way I feel like her new album I Speak Because I Can is too good and too professional. It just doesn’t have as much room to breathe or room for error as the debut and therefore it has a danger of becoming  a little boring in the long run. Oh well, it could be that I’m just a  sad chauvinist prick who would have preferred if she had stayed as the cute girl playing New Romantic over and over again. I’d like to think that I’m not such a sad case and the reason for me not to completely fall in love with Laura’s new album is just the fact that I prefer simple things and down-to-earth production.  She is still a great singer and a wonderful songwriter. Therefore I’m pretty sure that if they had released the demo tapes of the album instead of this polished and finished product, I probably would have liked it a lot more. In overall, Laura Marling is a wonderful and extremely talented folk artist capable of writing beautiful, thoughtful and inspiring songs and yours truly is a lousy and extremely foolish sad excuse of a reviewer capable of writing lame, pointless and uninspiring reviews. Which one do you believe? I think Laura will get my vote.

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Laura Marling Website
Laura Marling at myspace

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Review: The .357 String Band – Lightning From The North

The .357 String Band: Lightning From The North (2010)

String bands with a little punk and rock’n’roll background seem to be the thing for me at the moment. My latest finding is The .357 String Band from Milwaukee and I’ve been listening to them an awfully lot lately. Lightning From The North is their third album if I’m not mistaken and while I don’t think it’s absolutely perfect as a whole, it certainly has a lot of drop dead gorgeous moments. Especially Oh, Adilene, Days To Engrave and Rags to Rags are totally brilliant and you just can’t get tired of them. Believe me, I’ve tried and listened to each of these 3 tracks about 50 times during the last couple of weeks based on last.fm.

Lightning From The North contains a lot of highly energic, hard driving and banjo-driven bluegrass ready to bite into your bones, but in the end, the moments when they take the foot of the gas are the ones that leave the most lasting mark on my body.  This doesn’t mean that the songs that fall into that first category aren’t any good. All of this biteful bluegrass that they call streetgrass is extremely enjoyable and the songs are either really good or just awesome like Darkness In My Soul and the already mentioned Rags To Rags. It’s just that when they slow down just a little bit, they are able to deliver something heavenly brilliant like Oh Adilene and Days To Engrave. Even though about 2/3 of the album is only really good and nothing totally exceptional, it’s still totally impossible not to fall in love with Lightning from the North, because the remaining third sounds like the best thing ever and contains some of the finest songs of the year.

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Listen to Oh, Adilene:
[audio:http://www.onechord.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/06-oh-adilene.mp3]

The .357 String Band Website
The .357 String Band at myspace

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