![](//images.45worlds.com/t/cd/laura-marling-semper-femina-cd-t.jpg)
Comment by Magic Marmalade:
New entry in my top 100 (ish) favourite albums of all time.
It's a rare thing for an album that has taken my interest to remain among my favourites, and be one that I return to regularly, but this is one that keeps getting played.
While other albums of hers may have greater production value (to use the movie term, for expensive bells and whistles), this is a very stripped down, bare wood affair, which moves, under the slightest variations, seamlessly, and effortlessly between the core styles this uses: bluesy, folksy, slightly california sunshine-ish pop, with a startling intimacy, to a degree that makes it an almost uncomfortably close in listen.
Amidst the bare bones, creeking old wooden boat on a lazy river style acoustic weight of the purposely demo like presented instrumentation, and occasionally set against some over-amped grinding blues guitar scrapes; Is Laura Marling's brilliant, and deeply personal, in your ear singing, of simply excellent memorably melodic songs, that need no embellishment...
...All riding over a deep note of melancholy, the sour tone set against the sweet, which is what really keeps me coming back to it.
Some might find it drab, or basic, or even depressing, but it's one of those that if you lean in, you can hear much more going on in the almost inaudible emotional frequencies.
Would it be too much to say it is the closest I've heard someone come to getting that "Nick Drake quality" in this regard... the something in it... something
under it you have to be in tune with, to properly get.
As I said, it feels a little too close for comfort in it's intimacy, and gets me feel around my collar at times - "Phew, is it getting hot in here?"
Up Close. Personal. And very Feminine, in a way that even a dude, such as I is, can feel is from the deepest recesses of womanly-ness.