No Fucking Life That I Would Choose

Laura Marling “Master Hunter”

Laura Marling’s fourth album Once I Was An Eagle is one of the best engineered records I’ve heard, particularly for the sort of music it is – there’s only three instruments and one voice throughout, and it’s mostly recorded live, and in a way that makes you feel very aware of every motion, impact, and vibration. This sort of thing gets lost a lot of the time, resulting in records that sound like music rather than the physical act of making it. That’s fine most of the time, but the physicality is essential to Marling’s music – in lesser hands, this stuff might just come off as “pretty” or “rootsy,” and it would distract from the many parts that are violent, or tense, or otherwise visceral and cathartic. The entire album is like a long ritual to cast out painful bits of the past. Sometimes it’s more meditative, but on “Master Hunter,” it’s aggressive – she takes on a numb but powerful persona, and shuts down a depressed man who asks far too much of her: “Is this what you think I do in life when I’m not being used? / You’re not sad, you look for the blues / I have some news: / wrestling the rope from darkness is no fucking life that I would choose.” And just like that, with sharp words and some loud thuds, his memory is practically slain.

Buy it from Amazon.