Album Review: Patterns in Repeat by Laura Marling

On this beautifully intimate record all about parenthood, recorded with her new born baby by her side, you can hear the chirping of birds outside in the garden The last time we heard from Laura Marling, her album was dedicated to a hypothetical daughter. Song For Our Daughter was released in April 2020, right at the start of the pandemic, and the offspring referred to in the title was a purely figurative one. It did prove to be a strangely prophetic title, for Marling’s follow-up is all about her actual daughter, born not too long after the release of her last album.

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Marling's 2020 record Songs for Our Daughter has now become a prophetic album as the English singer-songwriter documents her feelings as she emerges into motherhood. Marling's album was written with her daughter happily cooing in her bouncer and for Marling, it was "the first time in [her] life, [she] was able to gaze into another human's eyes as [she] wrote." Quite literally faced with a new focus in her life, Patterns in Repeat delves into what the future will now look like as well as meditating over other close relationships. Opener "Child of Mine" features the gentle coos of Marling's daughter whilst Marling laughs on this candid recording.

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Whether by force of will or fate, Laura Marling's 2020 album Song For Our Daughter, in fact, was the precursor to the birth of Marling's first child. A girl. Recorded in her home studio, Patterns in Repeat focuses Marling's lens squarely on motherhood, family, and the passage of time. Already an accomplished lyricist some eight albums in, her seemingly offhanded observations here are gut wrenching in their simplicity.

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Laura Marling never misses. Seven of her eight albums score above 80/100 from music critics on AOTY, and all hold above 75/100 in listener ratings. By this simple math, her latest record, Patterns in Repeat, ranks second or third best after 2020’s Song for Our Daughter and 2013’s Once I Was an Eagle, depending on the counting method. Yet, a few challenges arise: first, when faced with such universal acclaim, the temptation to doubt it and write a contrarian review is strong; second, it can be challenging to pinpoint what’s genuinely excellent versus just good in folk music, especially within the rich catalog of a single artist.

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Laura Marling's rightly-lauded last album, 'Song For Our Daughter' (2020), saw her achieve the supreme feat of creating an intensely moving body of work around an imagined child; in the four years since, she actually has become a mother, and the result is 'Patterns In Repeat' - a tapestry of love, lineage, and the inextricable links between parents and their children. Now eight albums in, Marling has always mined emotional depths with only the most simple of tools - namely, an acoustic guitar and that singular voice - and here, her signature understatedness is taken even further. The record features no drums at all; instead, each track is blanketed by swathes of lush strings, any additional embellishment having been deemed surplus to requirements.

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Four years on from naming her previous release after a fictional daughter , Laura Marling's very real child is a seismic figure in the lyrics and methodology of her latest, 'Patterns In Repeat'. Dashing between domesticity and a domestic studio, she has crafted ten landscapes that are simultaneously, viscerally autobiographical and like being subsumed by her bookshelves. The atmospheric room-hiss at the album's core is one of its central sounds, a texture positioning Marling's eighth as her most honest yet .

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The last time we heard from Laura Marling, her forays in LUMP aside, she was singing to an imagined child on For You, from 2020's Song For Our Daughter. For Marling, that album was about a broad, figurative idea of daughters, not an actual child. That unrealised "miracle" has become reality in the years since, and Marling's worldview and philosophical mindset have opened, broadened and stretched to accommodate the change.

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