It’s the last few lines though that are the most curiously lovely though.

It sounds as though she’s had her nose in a folk lexicon or three, singing of being “born in the fog of the day”, and floating away on a log, delivering the lyrics in a lightly husky, matter of fact tone that occasionally flicks with a raconteurish smoke curl reminiscent of Howe Gelb. The record was recorded live, so you can hear her fingers sliding down the strings, weaving a sensitive and warm Drake-like grain. The first comparison that springs to mind here is Nick Drake, but not because she’s written yet another soundalike to add to the pile – no, it’s the thoughtfulness of the playing, and finding a voice recognizable as her own. This is the kind of thing usually reserved for that mid-album cataclysm – if this is how she starts, goodness knows (in a good way) what we’re in for over the next nine songs… Her voice still has that extraordinary clarity, but it’s somehow bolder, incanting, “All of this can be broken / All of this can be broken / Hold your devil by his spoke and spin him to the ground” with a tempered force that summons Mumford & The Whale’s folky storm, whilst managing to avoid their own earnest hoedowns. Gone are the sweet odes that made myth out of her own teenage years, seemingly replaced by her looking at herself through a thorny filter of pastoral lore. This ain’t the Laura Marling we used to know…

She’s followed the tried and tested Hollywood method of dying her hair brown to set aside any notions of frivolity, and told NME.com that the record deals with “responsibility, particularly the responsibility of womanhood.” Cripes, and here we were half hoping that she was going to play the Frankee to a certain Charlie Fink’s Eamon…īut fear not – on first listen, although ‘I Speak Because I Can’ marks a much more mature Laura than ‘Alas I Cannot Swim’ (she’s still only a whisker short of 20!) it never dwindles into po-faced female eunuchery, and the rambunctious stylings of Marcus Mumford, Ted Dwayne and Winston Marshall from Mumford & Sons, and Tom Fiddle from Noah & The Whale keep it well and truly out of the doldrums.

The omens are lingering dastardly in the background – all signs point towards Laura Marling’s second album, ‘I Speak Because I Can’ being a work of Thoroughly Serious Business.

Me speak pretty one day