Happy 15th Anniversary to Laura Marling’s debut album Alas, I Cannot Swim, originally released in limited-edition “songbox” form February 4, 2008 and in standard formats February 11, 2008.
Sometimes, listening to a debut from an artist with a unique standpoint and voice is like looking at a seed. There is a shadow of their future ethos hidden in the seed, but only through careful reflection and excavation of their craft can it be unveiled. Other times, one can listen to a debut and see all of that artist’s genius laid bare for you. This is the case with Alas, I Cannot Swim (2008), Laura Marling’s ghostly and perplexing debut record. She owns her sound from the very jump and waits for you to peel at the folds of her complexity.
“Tap At My Window” is perhaps the strongest example of Marling’s mastery of arrangement, even at this early stage in career. The three-verse song is mostly in a major key, and briefly diverts to minor at the end of each verse. The switch to minor is subtle; she does not bang on it to make sure that you know something has happened.
But she does introduce the beginning of each new (major-key) verse with panache: the first transition introduces a string part, and the second comes at the end of a propulsive drum fill. The result is that the beginning of each verse feels new, revelatory, even though it’s really the same every time. She subtly moves us away from the center without us noticing, so that the place we’ve been the whole time has felt unfamiliar.
Where “Tap At My Window” foreshadows the nexus of grandiosity and subtlety that would define Marling’s later work (such as the run of four songs that make up the beginning of 2013’s Once I Was an Eagle), tunes like “You’re No God,” and “Failure” show that same subtlety playing out with pop songs. Each tune leans on a more upbeat instrumental and a big hook, but she never beats you over the head with it. In “You’re No God,” for example, the drums hang way back in the mix for the first half of the song, which keeps the tune grounded in the record’s more subdued, broader context. “Alexandra,” on 2020’s mesmerizing Song For Our Daughter, could have a massive pop sound, but Marling shows restraint in keeping it from letting loose. This core of Marling’s sound—accessibility without chaos—was there from the beginning.
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An enormous contrast to the pop center of the record is “My Manic and I,” a lightning-fast rip through a relationship besieged by incompatible mental illnesses. Marling’s narrator feels that the only way to avoid being sucked into a black hole is to blow up the relationship—which only solves some of her problems. Lyrically, she expertly zooms the camera all the way in: “I wander the streets / avoiding them eats / ’til the ring on my finger /slips to the ground” while the musical character of the song, with its overlong sentences and phrases feels like an old-time folk ballad that would be sung by a distant third-person narrator. This contrast between form and content, as well as the contrast between “My Manic and I” and the rest of the record, are part of what makes Marling’s work endlessly rewarding: there is always a juxtaposition to burrow into.
The drama of Marling’s voice is another draw for her work; her masterwork on Alas, I Cannot Swim is the album closer “Your Only Doll (Dora),” in which she expertly jumps large intervals, excavates the basement of her range, and evokes subtle emotional changes through her voice. The word “girl,” on the second-to-last chorus, for example, passes from strength to despair to resignation over the course of one note. It’s vocal talent, but it’s also a hugely confident embrace of her (rather complex and sometimes unpredictable material). Unlike so many singer-songwriters, who go for Cool Mellow Acoustic Winter Tracks to Snuggle To, Marling is willing to get in your face without trending toward melodrama. There’s still nobody who does it quite like she does.
Marling, of course, has grown as an artist since Alas, I Cannot Swim. “Fortune” from Song For Our Daughter, for example, crams an entire life into the conceit of spending a mother’s running away fund, and Alas’ material is generally more unwieldy. She’d also find space for her virtuosic guitar playing to lend color to her songs on later songs like “Salinas” and “The End of the Affair.” But as far as debuts go, this group of songs reflects an artist who knows who she is, and who has an exciting and hard-hitting body of work waiting to come out. One can only hope that it continues.
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