Laura Marling - Patterns In Repeat - Structures Capable Of Joy

Laura Marling – Patterns In Repeat

★★★★☆

Released October 25th, 2024 on Partisan Records and Chrysalis Records

Look, I need you to stop for a second, okay? No, stop moving, sit down. Breathe. Take in the air, the stillness. This is that Laura Marling vibe, but it’s more now. You are in sore need of peace. Don’t deny it! The world is on fire more than it isn’t, these days. What days you ask, laughing, as though the world weren’t always on fire from the minute we first sowed crops and put up walls. You’re stressed, though. Everyone is. Get the kettle on. Brew a cup of tea, something herbal, a little honey.

Patterns In Repeat, Laura Marling’s eighth solo record, is a master class in uncomplicated complication. It is immediately intimate; Marling’s new daughter coos within seconds of the album’s beginning, and the sense throughout is that this was recorded on a bright Sunday morning in her living room. Usually when you say “this sounds like it was recorded in a living room” it’s a negative (unless you’re a scabby-sored punk rock band of course). Patterns In Repeat has that sound in the sense that it breaks down the wall between the artist and the listener, though. You’re practically in that living room with her, hearing the creak of the floorboards, watching the breeze blow the leaves in the street, maybe holding her baby while she tunes her guitar. It’s remarkably straightforward folk music – just the singer and her guitar, no other instruments – and it is reminiscent at times of the best Joni Mitchell moments.

The complication comes in with the subject matter. Marling’s previous album, 2020’s Song For Our Daughter, was about a fictitious daughter. It was a letter hashing out her feelings on the subject, from an artist unsure about whether she wanted to be a parent in the first place. Patterns In Repeat comes from a much different perspective: Marling now has an 18 month old daughter. Folkies have written songs about parenthood before. I have an inherited copy of Peter, Paul and Mommy that sets that out starkly. Many of Joni Mitchell’s songs contain subtle allusions to her feelings about the child she had to give up as a broke young folk singer. Laura Marling’s work is neither as insipid as the former nor as broken-hearted as the latter. Patterns In Repeat is exactly that: an examination of the patterns we fall into as parents, as children, as lovers, as professionals.

“Child Of Mine” is the big “I’m a parent now” number, and “Lullaby” is what it says plain, but “Your Girl” seems to be a missive directed in the opposite way, toward her own parents. Much of the album is concerned deeply with the passage of time, and how many of those patterns we fall into take a lifetime to recognize (as on the album’s best track, “Caroline”). Slow down, Laura Marling is telling you. Take it all in. These moments pass by faster than a summer squall. The baby you are lulling to sleep with Things We Lost In The Fire is going to see the band her friend is the drummer for just a moment later.

It all passes by too fast. Have a cup of tea and savor it.