A great record from this fall: Laura Marling reaches the top of the hill and the folk echoes

Nthe penultimate issue of “Uncut” magazine, the album of the month was “Patterns In Repeat”, by Laura Marling. 18 pages ahead, in the reissues section, the list was headed by the fourth volume of the “Joni Mitchell Archives — The Asylum Years (1976-1980)”. For the design of a perfect triangle, perhaps something from Marianne Faithfull would be missing. Because, if the relationship of aesthetic intimacy between Laura and Joni was always evident and clearly confessed (“If Joni Mitchell didn’t exist, I would never have existed”, declared Marling in 2017), in a much less clear and explicit way, but no less real , common ground will also exist between Laura, daughter of the 5th Baronet of Marling (“of Stanley Park and Sedbury Park in the County of Gloucester”) and Marianne, Baroness Erisso von Sacher-Masoch. Not only in aristocratic ancestry but, especially, in the condition of starlets teenagers with a folk profile whose maturation took place far outside this perimeter. To “Mojo”, Laura Marling leaves very few doubts: “I’ve never heard folk music. I know that Bob Dylan and many others come from what is, inattentively, considered the folk tradition. But I am the echo, of the echo, of the echo of all this. It couldn’t be further away.”