Fascinated With Loss but Reviving Traditions

By JON PARELES
“All of this can be broken,” the English songwriter Laura Marling sang in “Devil’s Spoke,” which started her set at City Winery on Friday night. Her lyrics are often mournful; they ponder loss, fear, separation, heartbreak, war and death. Yet even as Ms. Marling sang about mortality and ruin, her music attested to something durable: the British folk traditions that were renewed by trad-rock of the 1960s. Ms. Marling has chosen a heritage of modal, Celtic-rooted melodies and intricate yet unassuming guitar parts, and she uses them to write songs that face the worst.

At 20, Ms. Marling is a luminary of Britain’s latest folk resurgence.

Her second album, “I Speak Because I Can” (Virgin), was released this year. In the mid-2000s, while 1960s-loving American bands were revisiting the psychedelic tangents and traceries of freak-folk, Britons stayed less freaky and more folky, returning once again to the verities of ballads and waltzes that can be played by a lone busker or boosted by a full band. During her set, Ms. Marling established her 1960s bona fides with a song by Jackson C. Frank, an American songwriter who was embraced in England and made his only album in 1965.

Some of Britain’s newer folk-rooted bands use trendy combinations of electronic beats and effects with traditionalist melodies; the technology can make them sound instantly dated. Ms. Marling doesn’t bother with instrumental novelties. Her band had banjo and cello, along with a folk-rock rhythm section, but she played a good part of her set alone on acoustic guitar. Her songs sound older than she is, and they innovate from within, through mood and lyrics. Some sketch stories or states of mind, like “I Speak Because I Can,” about a woman whose husband has left her: “I cook the meals and he got the life/Now I’m just old for the rest of my time.”

Other songs turn archetypal and visionary. “Beaten battered cold, my children will live just to grow old,” Ms. Marling sang in “Rambling Man,” continuing, “But if I sit here and weep, I’ll be blown over by the slightest breeze.” Her reedy, determined voice and her subtly accomplished guitar parts defy any thoughts of fragility. She makes music that’s haunted, but somehow, through sheer stoic willpower, serene.

Smoke Fairies, who shared the bill with Ms. Marling, are also steeped in the 1960s, with equally pensive songs. “When you grow old, will you remember my name?” one lyric asked. Smoke Fairies are an English duo — Jessica Davies and Katherine Blamire — who are backed by a band that nudges the songs toward trad-rock. While Ms. Marling’s songs are suffused with solitude, Smoke Fairies rely on intertwinings. Their two guitars share fingerpicked patterns reminiscent of the British folk-jazz group Pentangle, and their two voices move in close harmonies, with timbres blending almost like sisters. The songs hint at secrets that the two women can share, at least, with each other.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/17/arts/music/17laura.html?partner=rss&emc=rss