She follows it with I Was Just a Card, three and a half minutes of stop-start interaction between horns, strings and delicate guitar, Don't Ask Me Why, about looking for answers in unsavoury places and Salinas, a portrait of her mother set in John Steinbeck’s hometown that builds up with ripples of melody and sharp-tongued as the beasts roar in the background and the narrator speculates whether she’ll ever see heaven again.
Starting with just Marling and her guitar, the album’s centrepiece, The Beast, clocking in at just under six minutes, delivers a devastating analysis of the ways love transforms itself into confusion, deception, anger and confusion and is followed by Night After Night which is an excursion into Leonard Cohen Famous Blue Raincoat territory, acoustic guitar and an eerily calm and measured voice delivering lyrics about love gone sour and sanctuaries that turn out to be minefields.
With the album’s themes firmly set in place, My Friends and Rest in the Bed continue the exploration before the album’s other tour de force, Sophia starts as a not-quite lullaby with the narrator despatching a former lover (where I have been lately is no concern of yours), invokes the ancient goddess of wisdom, and builds slowly into anthemic proportions with a churning chorus.
That rousing chorus flows into sea shanty territory for the album proper’s closer All My Rage, which wraps proceedings up tidily with a lilting Celtic melody and a rousing chorus, but as you’d expect in the days of bonus tracks tacked on to the end, there’s an excursion into the Tuscan hills on Flicker and Fail, which works well enough as an extra but doesn’t really add anything much to the main proceedings.
So from here the question is where next? There’s enough on offer here to justify going back to investigate those earlier titles, though that’s not necessarily a priority at the moment given other avenues that also need investigating.
The appearance of a follow-up, on the other hand, will probably prompt an immediate purchase.