It's hard to make folk music in the mould of '60s/'70s singer-songwriters without sounding like mere imitation. With Halloween coming up, it would be easy for the fingerpicked nylon-string ballads of Laura Marling's Patterns in Repeat to sound like a costume.
And yet, these tender tributes to motherhood are more classic than plagiaristic — a song like "Caroline" ably following in the footsteps of Leonard Cohen's "Suzanne," sounding like it could have been written anytime between 1967 and 2024, in Greenwich Village or Greenwich, London. Patterns in Repeat indeed.