There’s no doubting the precocious talent of Laura Marling. At just 25 she recently released her fifth album, Short Movie, which matched the spiky introspection of song-writing previously driven by folk melodies with a new rock-orientated sound.

The best singer-songwriters, you might say, survey life's experiences with a forensic eye. That’s certainly true of Laura Marling. Her new album Short Movie  chronicles the singer's recent stint in LA where she'd relocated for a couple of years. Marling's adventures are catalogued with a satisfying mix of introspection and free-form vibes. That, of course, was also partly true of her last offering, Once I Was an Eagle. The difference here is that her hopes and disappointments are expressed with a Seventies rawness that also hints at an inner rock-chick.

Artists rarely progress, though, without a couple of false starts: Here they are to be mainly found in the first half. The album starts confidentally enough with “Warrior”, which features impressive John Martyn-style guitar work. Next up, the telecaster guitars and rock rhythms of “False Hope” have a snarl that sits somewhere between PJ Harvey and Chrissie Hynde. But, after that, things start to meander. “Strange” simply sounds like some beatnik poetry mumbled over improvised chords.

Still, from track seven on the album's defiantly back on course. It’s not just the presence of Marling’s gorgeous melodies – and who couldn't love “Easy” with its Spanish chords with a breezy Californian melody – it's more how she blends all her influences. “Gurdjieff’s Daughter” is a particular treat. Gurdjieff was a kind of early 20th-century Russian mystic-cum-guru, and the song looks at advice and those who would give it. Intriguingly, it does so over chords that could have been lifted from Dire Strait's "Sultans of Swing".

The mystical theme continues on the title track, whose subject is a frazzled "shaman" whom Marling ran into one night. His motto, apparenty, was "life's a short movie, man". As the singer tries to appreciate what life must be like for him she suddenly feels humble and insignificant. It's that sense of wonder that, ultimately, makes Short Movie such a rich experience.

Overleaf: watch the video for "Short Movie"

I suppose that whether Once I Was An Eagle appeals may depend on whether you consider "underwhelming" a synonym for "disappointing". It's the word that surfaces most, the more I listen to the fourth album from newly Los Angeles-resident Laura Marling; but I use it to conjure the lack of flashiness, of anything overpowering about the record rather than for its negative connotations.

Laura Marling has a way, in mid-song, of arching her head back as far as it will go, as if she were opening herself up to the heavens. She’s never been one to let herself go on stage, at least not physically: there are no unnecessary histrionics, just a surrender to the extraordinary force that pours through when she stands and delivers.

This was the year I finally fell in love with Laura Marling’s music. I liked her first two albums well enough, but I couldn't quite shake the feeling that the endless chorus of critical hosannas was more about what people wanted her to be than what she actually was. Well, A Creature I Don’t Know certainly changed all that.

The music-buying public must sometimes get tired of critics declaiming that modern songwriting is as good as ever. As good as The Stones, or Al Green, or Joni Mitchell? Really? Laura Marling’s first two albums do a lot to shore up the critics’ case. And with this year’s Brit Award moving Marling into the mainstream, her new one, A Creature I Don’t Know, is possibly the most hotly anticipated album of the year. So how does it live up to the expectations?

To call Laura Marling folk rock’s Sylvia Plath for the Pete Doherty generation probably sounds like faint praise. But ever since I heard her described thus I haven’t been able to lose the Plath comparison. Fragile, sensitive, effortlessly talented; Marling’s all these things. But more, she’s a poet of feeling too much and caring too deeply, able to perfectly crystallise such emotions because she always seems to be living them.

The best or at least most interesting new music CDs our reviewers have heard this month includes the latest from electro-pop pioneers Goldfrapp, Ry Cooder collaborating with the Chieftains, Ethiopian jazz from Mulatu Astatke as well as new albums from Envy, Son of Dave, Laura Marling, Gonjasufi, Asere, Balkan Beat Box, Chumbawumba, Jónsi and Michael McGoldrick.