The first night of Laura Marling’s five-show residency at Hackney church on Tuesday seems, perhaps, the wrong gig to be reviewing. The atmosphere is rapt, the lighting low; the acoustics are so reverential that the speakers hanging from the ceiling are painted a saintly white. The most exciting visuals come when the lacquer on Marling’s guitar suddenly catches the light.
The apt set to have witnessed might have been the Saturday matinee, where babies and toddlers were welcome. It would have been a simpatico habitat for Marling’s fresh-out-the-oven album Patterns in Repeat, released the previous week.
Recorded at home in bursts when Marling’s child was quite dewy to the world, it features gurgling and incidental household sounds. (The string arrangements sound very much like they were grafted on afterwards by people who had slept through the night.)
As a reaction to new life, these songs will have resonated quite differently in a church full of parents in desperate need of some cultural relief walking teething infants around. As it is, even without the found sound accompaniments of thrown rattles, Marling’s return to live performance is merely regulation-great, with minor reservations. Divided into three sections – no encore, as Marling fans have come to expect – her new songs make up the beating heart of tonight’s set.
First, though, comes a reminder of what a class act Marling is. A suite – four pugnacious, rambling, interlinked songs from her 2013 magnum opus, Once I Was an Eagle – manages to conjure up echoes of Joni Mitchell and Bob Dylan in his passive-aggressive prime while remaining entirely about Marling’s recurring preoccupations: power balances in relationships, knowing and not knowing. Her elastic voice drips with attitude, then soars with abandon into Arabic-sounding scales, one skilful guitar motif anchoring the cascades of words.
A sudden swerve into the deeper past comes with Alas I Cannot Swim, the title track of her 2008 debut album, released when Marling was 18. Her teenage lyrics agonise over temptations out of her reach. She ruefully describes it this evening as “a novelty song”. Marling repudiates her youthful distaste for gold – and swimming towards her desires. “I really do want gold now! So much changes as you get older,” she confides. “I should have jumped in.”
At the other end of the night comes a coda of older material – some with more accompaniment, some with less – kicking off with the riveting What He Wrote, a 2010 track redolent of Leonard Cohen. In the same way as Cat Power can fill venues singing the songs of Bob Dylan, you’d pay good money to hear Marling cover Cohen of an evening.
Seven tracks in, though, her solo guitar tenure concludes. The stage becomes busy with members of Hackney’s Deep Throat Choir, on hand to swell and swirl the nine songs taken from Patterns in Repeat, plus a string section and regular bassist Nick Pini.
Marling is fully aware that there is something a little bit cringe about writing about motherhood. But apart from the sweet earworm that is Child of Mine, and Lullaby – two of her fuzzier responses to her wriggling new set of responsibilities – the Patterns songs don’t just dwell on the new arrival, but on the ripple effect of them up and down the generations. As part of her master’s degree in psychoanalysis, she came across a therapeutic modality known as family constellations, and on songs such as Patterns and the title track, she considers interrelationships and inheritance.
As ever, though, the best tracks on Patterns remain those where Marling’s tongue is sharp, rather than cosseting. Sombre, old-school and mysterious, The Shadows wrestles with someone who is leaving, and what that someone knows (“one day she’ll tear me apart”). “Mmmm, hmmm,” the choir agrees, as Pini’s bowed bass groans.
Elsewhere, the string arrangements seem overdominant, and overpolite where they could be braver. String sections are so often bussed in as shortcuts to emotion. Their subtle bullying – you will feel a little bittersweet now! – Disneyfies feeling: Your Girl suffers here. Fortunately, nothing can mar Marling’s rendition of the album’s formal and melodic banger, Caroline – about an old flame suddenly turning up like a half-remembered song.
The opulence and uplift assigned to the strings is actually achieved through the combination of the singer’s unexpectedly exultant vocals and the surging of the choir. On this generous live rendition of the title track, Marling, an inveterate seeker of freedom throughout her songcraft, comments obliquely on another person’s choices before hauling the track around.
“I gave it up willingly,” she sings, “nothing was lost in the bringing of you to me.” The choir takes flight as Marling opens her throat. One interpretation? No regrets: parenthood was a conscious and rewarding choice.
