Laura Marling deserved every iota of praise she received for 2008’s Alas I Cannot Swim, a glorious collection of utterly charming folk confessionals. A hard act to follow, then, for her second album I Speak Because I Can? Perhaps, but Marling is nonetheless single-minded in her determination to leap the bar set by every critic writing about her today.
Simultaneously the greatest virtue and most distracting flaw of Alas I Cannot Swim was that it traded so heavily in abstractions. On I Speak Because I Can, Marling’s songwriting evinces the same love of noir metaphors and carefully-painted imagery, but now rendered more artfully than ever before. On ‘Devil’s Spoke’ she wrestles with her demons, percussive rhythms and heavy country guitars rising and falling in a beautifully atmospheric tableau. ‘Rambling Man’, meanwhile, couples similarly sweeping acoustic landscapes with an intimately introspective chorus built around Marling’s effortlessly thoughtful intonations (Lord give me to a rambling man / let it always be known that I was who I am).
The most ephemeral shift between first and second albums, however, is the sea change in Marling’s vocals. Gone are the vaguely coquettish strains of Alas I Cannot Swim; when Marling sings now, she seems to have aged far more than the two years that have passed. Her voice is more richly textured than ever, rising to the grand choruses with stunning force. I Speak Because I Can fails when she reverts to old form in this respect: on ‘Blackberry Stone’, for example, her vocals seem somehow lethargic, and as a result the entire song passes the listener by like a quiet interlude in something much greater.
Marling’s new glory, however, is cemented by the time we reach the enormous ‘Goodbye England (Covered In Snow)’. Soft violins usher her into a beautifully tuneful verse, and the playful stop-start of gentle verse and rising bridge shepherds the song to a glorious climax, as Marling bids winter and her lover farewell (I wrote an epic letter to you / it was twenty-two pages front and back / but it’s too good to be used).
Confounding cynical expectations, I Speak Because I Can is not the stylistic stall of which so many were afraid, but rather an impressive development. At the risk of succumbing to a common and rather condescending cliché, Marling has ‘grown up’ and created an album that is lyrically mature and musically adventurous in equal measure. Less instantaneous with its hooks than her debut, I Speak Because I Can is a complex pleasure, but certainly a pleasure.
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Marcus Kernohan is the founder and editor-in-chief of Stereokill.net. Email him at 
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