Laura Marling’s 2008 Mercury Music Prize nominated-release, Alas, I Cannot Swim, was a complicated affair, marked by incredibly ‘poppy’ acoustic songs about such light-hearted fare as burnt-out talent, regret, and young minds forever shut off from the possibility of true love. Yet despite its heady subject matter it was sweetly delivered, and at first listen one might be tempted to file it alongside Lisa Mitchell in the “delightful, acoustic, folk-pop girls” section of your record collection, but it set itself apart by possessing a genuine emotional depth. The singing was that of a 17 year-old girl, but the song was that of one much older.

With I Speak Because I Can, Marling takes us further down the rabbit hole. Gone is young girl who examined her world with wonder and whimsy, and in her place is a woman grappling with her emergence into the adult world, adult relationships and adult responsibilities. “It’s hard to accept yourself as someone you don’t desire/As someone you don’t want to be”, she sings on Rambling Man, but in a way that is so far removed from self-pity that she seems to have realised the problem, dealt with it, and is no so far out the other side that she can dismiss it as one of those trials of youth. And all from a girl born after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

The album itself is very deliberate in its evocation of an older time. The album opens with the sound of a stylus dropping on to a record, a very faint crackle and hiss, and a long, slow crescendo on an organ before launching into Devil’s Spoke, a guitar and banjo-propelled song about the immutable strength of relationships in an uncertain world filled with demons of all kinds. It begins in an ominous fashion, with the banjo sounding as menacing as I have ever heard a banjo be. But then it lightens up in the final third, benefitting from some lovely quiet/loud dynamics, before ending with that ominous banjo again.

Made by Maid follows, and its quiet simplicity allows Marling’s confessional style to shine. It’s this song, along with Goodbye England (Covered In Snow) that has brought her comparisons to Joni Mitchell, with The Times going so far as to compare this album favourably to Mitchell’s Court and Spark, and to praise Marling’s “beguiling hymnal poetry that once served Leonard Cohen so well”.

Rambling Man is a beautiful song, featuring Marling singing a duet with her own voice, simultaneously high and ghostly in the background and low and earthy in the fore.

Goodbye England (Covered In Snow) was the first single, and deservedly so. As she explained to the audience at her Sydney Festival shows in January, it is a song recalling a particular spot that was significant to her and her father. It’s a beautiful, touching remembrance with more than passing resemblance to some of Martha Wainwright’s or Joni Mitchell’s more idiosyncratic phrasing, and it is probably the youngest Marling sounds on the entire album. She sounds so sweet and lovely, and exactly how you would expect a young woman to sound when singing about trying to become an adult on her own terms. And when the rest of her band joins in on the chorus, adding their far-off voices to the ghostly choir, it almost brings a tear to the eye.

The band, it should be mentioned, is largely comprised of members of Mumford & Sons – they and Marling have been moving in the same circles for many years now, and indeed Marcus Mumford and Marling have been an item for nearly a year. It’s worth mentioning because there are definite similarities between the two, although certainly enough that a fan of one may not like the other.

Much has been made of Marling’s more “mature” sound, a word that can often act as a synonym for “dull” or “pretentious”. But there is nothing about this album that feels insincere or put on. In fact, the only real strike against this album is that it might be too dark and gloomy on occasion – Hope In The Air creates such a mood of imminent doom it feels a little bit like the final act of King Lear, with any hope of salvation long since disappeared. But it’s a rare miss-step on a remarkably accomplished album.

And it is a beautiful album, drawing heavily on the English folk tradition, particularly in some of the images that Marling evokes. Olde worlde tales that recall an earlier England, when the countryside was still untamed by highways and supermarkets. And it is an album that is both a timely addition to the folk renaissance of the past year or two and an immensely assured, timeless release from a young woman still finding her way in the world.

Marling recently stated that this album was a “transitional” one, paving the way for another album to be released towards the end of the year. No word yet on what it is transitioning to, but based on the talent exhibited on her two albums so far, they may well be paving the way for a long, successful career.