Billie Marten – ‘Drop Cherries’ album review
Another year, another great Billie Marten album. The line between making yourself rare in the market and available whenever you’re wanted is a tricky line that all musicians toe. Some believe, especially in the streaming age where everything is available at a moment’s notice, that scarcity is the key to driving up demand. Marten knows that’s bull: always having something new is the best way to keep people interested in you.
Of course, that leaves you open to releasing subpar material just to get it out there. Marten has never seemed to have that issue. On her fourth album in eight years, the 23-year-old British folkie is as comfortable as she’s ever been in her own skin. Drop Cherries might not sound a whole lot different from albums like Feeding Seahorses By Hand and Flora Fauna, but being able to maintain that level of quality is a tall order.
Marten is an artist that serves two masters. If you want to parse through every word that she sings, you’ll find a wealth of insight and illumination regarding topics of love, loss, and growing up. If you just want some gentle background noise behind whatever it is you’re cleaning up, well, Marten’s music is great for that too. Opening track ‘New Idea’ falls into the latter category, with three minutes of sweeping harmonies, strings, and acoustic guitar to welcome you into the album without saying a single word.
“You can either skate this album’s surface or dive right to the core,” Marten herself says in promotional material for the album. “Your choice. There was no need to shout this time.”
Marten also divides the album into three notable areas. “From celebrating moments of the mundane (‘Just Us’), through deep existential questioning (‘Devil Swim’, ‘Acid Tooth’, ‘Arrows’), to the final resolve which is the pure simplicity of sharing a moment with someone you love (‘Drop Cherries’, ‘I Bend To Him’).” Even the mundane explorations can feel weighty and impactful once you embrace Marten’s talent for poetry and storytelling.
On songs like ‘God Above’, it can be difficult to parse through Marten’s melodic twists and turns to actually understand what she’s saying. With an album filled with country fiddle, twangy acoustic guitar, pastoral plucks, and stately drums, Marten fully fleshes out her indie folk dream world with all the bells and whistles that she wasn’t able to utilise when she was just a kid making solo records. The world is now wide open for Marten to explore musically.
‘I Can’t Get My Head Around You’ is a woozy probing of falling for someone, even if that love causes confusion and delirium. Sometimes it’s the simplest statements that hit the hardest, and when Marten admits that she “Can’t get my head around you and then I can’t get enough”, it’s the kind of bare-bones admission that would look great on a Hallmark card. Only Marten can bring real elegance to something that, admittedly, is a bit eye-rolling on paper. But that’s why you listen to it with a fantastically hazy folk arrangement around it.
How anyone can get away with naming a song ‘Willow’ after Taylor Swift fully claimed it is anyone’s guess, but Marten’s song of the same name is another solid meditation on loneliness without the comfort of love. ‘Nothing But Mine’ sees Marten wander over to the piano for one of the most potent ballads in her repertoire. Stripping everything away except being present and committed, Marten finds the beauty in simplicity, even as the song’s arrangement swirls around her in a tornado of sound.
That same expert sense of piano balladry carries over to ‘Tongue’. Before closing out with the album’s stirring title track, Marten finds room to stick in the phenomenal single ‘This Is How We Move’. It never seems as though pop music has ever filtered into Marten’s songwriting thoughts, but ‘This Is How We Move’ does have that same irresistible hook that great pop music is built on. It might be hidden beneath more layers of gentle acoustic music, but it’s certainly there.
There might not be anything new under the sun, but that simplifies the fact that Marten is one of the most consistently great artists of the modern day. By this point, when you get a new Billie Marten album, you know that you’re going to get an album chock full of relaxed folk, introspective lyrics, and top-shelf composition. There aren’t many artists that you can rely on year in and year out for great material, but Marten should be counted among the best of them.
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