FEATURE:
My Five Favourite Albums of 2021
Billie Marten – Flora Fauna
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RELEASED on 21st May…
PHOTO CREDIT: Katie Silvester
Billie Marten’s third studio album, Flora Fauna, is one of my top five picks of this year. The final two choices of this feature will take us in different sonic directions. So far, my choices have been albums made by women. It has been another incredible year for female talent. I have said many times how Marten’s 2016 debut, Writing of Blues and Yellows, is my favourite album of the past decade. As I do with this feature, I am going to quote a couple of reviews for Flora Fauna, a couple of interviews where Marten spoke about the album. I am also going to post a link where you can buy the album. In fact, I will start with that. Here is where you can buy the excellent Flora Fauna. There are some really deep and interesting interviews that were published around the release of Flora Fauna. I am going to source a few. The first, with NBHAP started by highlighting the fact that Marten is a bolder artist (than she previously was):
“Bold indeed, Flora Fauna, by means of staging the organic diversity of the world we all live in as opposed to the tiring and exploitative mechanisms our modern society has come to develop as essential elements of living, is a vital reminder of what is needed to stay alive. “We do just need very specific elements to thrive … without the need to move all the time and grow”, Billie emphasises, as she observes the pains of modern day progress. The new Billie Marten sound neatly clicks with that refreshing message, more daring, vital and yet with her mellow trademark right on display.
The record itself then is indeed spiked with vivid song material that does pure justice to the flashy visions of it all. Garden Of Eden, the record’s opener and one song that sparkles brightest with the need to thrive, about which Billie remarks that “it uses the idea and the metaphor of us physically being plant lives, which we kind of are”. Roaring bass lines mingle along her tender vocal performance, as the lyrics head right down into terrains of absolute vitality: “Eat the sun and water up / To be someone / Can’t get enough”, before the chorus kicks in with its yearning “I wanna feel alive / Garden of eternal sunshine”.
Flora Fauna sees Billie Marten breaking free from earlier inhibitions, both musically and lyrically and it is indeed no surprise, that the artist herself expresses her progression in these terms:
“I was very scared then and played very timidly. My fingers hadn’t developed to play something properly. I was much more aware of criticism and how to please everybody. That has kind of subsided now, to some relief. It was a lot more lyrical and I was into English literature and I was trying to get more of the poetic side out. Because it was kind of fashionable to me at the time. This album is more direct. I am speaking to you and this is what I want to say.”
In terms of her message, she has made a terrific step forward in that way: “I have always been quite vague and abstract with my writing”, she states. “I just got bored of doing that and I wanted to just write on a very immediate basis, and have my stream-of-consciousness running all the time”. Flora Fauna is the result of that evolution and stands as a shining beacon in these still uncertain times. One can only hope that its messages of “positive change” will endure the test of time and lead Billie Marten on all her future ventures”.
I love reading Marten discuss her albums and the process. She moved to London after the release of her debut album. One can hear influences of the city (good and bad) in her subsequent work. I wonder whether Marten will go back to Yorkshire (her parents live there) in the future. Nature and more rural climbs give Marten greater creativity and inspiration. NOTION chatted with her, where the topic of the contrast and clash of the city and country:
“Being out of London has been instrumental in crafting the album, providing her with a different perspective and a certain sense of freedom to do what she wants. “It’s just much more of a freeing experience. There’s much less of an industry situation where you feel the entirety of London is looking over your shoulder. It feels more like a return to when I first started writing, being in the semi-rural area and having lots of time and space to think properly.”
That’s of course not to say that Marten doesn’t like the city – she lives there, after all. “Cities are a bit like a weird drug, especially London. The city’s great and a pillar of culture. Everything’s there at your feet all the time. You can buy fruit and veg at 4AM if you want to,” she jokes. “It’s accessible and there’s so many different people there. But it doesn’t have everything that I need, and I think I’m learning to be a bit more selfish about that,” she confesses. “I’ll always change my mind and there’s definite glimmers of amazing lights that come from London. You can forge a plan within 10 minutes and you’re incredibly ensconced in that big life living. But it’s most definitely not forever,” she adds with a smile.
PHOTO CREDIT: Jack Orton
Being selfish in figuring out what you want versus what you need, and prioritizing those needs is something that not everyone her age has figured out just yet. Marten, however, seems incredibly self-aware and at ease, surrounded by nature’s gentleness and its peace and quiet. “I prefer a much slower pace. It’s a lifestyle that suits me. I’m really crap at nine-to-fives and I’m so bad at going to the studio every day. Maybe I’m kind of just entering retirement now, and I’m okay with it,” she grins. “I’m embracing it. I have the wild touring life and the industry schmoozing in London, and then here I have me planting my seeds and using my feet properly and having much better posture and lungs.”
In a sense, her new album reiterates what Marten reveals about her trial separation with London. She simply feels much more at home in the countryside than she does in the big city. “Everyone’s very tall and big and has huge personalities. I chameleon into them but not very well, which just means I’m still kind of hunched over and trying to protect myself. Music gives you terrible posture, but then as soon as you leave, everything’s lighter and clearer – it’s amazing!”
She is particular about the production, mirroring the maturity displayed on the record in her quest for more agency and ownership. Marten is carving out her own path – her own formula for flourishing as an artist. “I’d love to do more with it [production]. I’ve always been heavy on the co-producing aspect. It’s important to not let songs kind of fly away with another person, as you made them and they should sound the way you want them to sound. I’m just getting back to the more technical side of things. I have huge gaps of knowledge, probably due to having been so young when I started out in the industry and being surrounded by men. So I just didn’t ask enough questions, but I’m relearning how to do things, even just basic cabling.”
PHOTO CREDIT: Jack Orton
Marten feels lucky that her new label trusted her to explore and experiment with her artistic identity. “I was very impressionable at the start, and a corporation as big as Sony – it’s so fickle and horrible, I hated it. Which is sad, because it puts such a downer on you as a person, cause you’re deflated and unenthusiastic and you feel very small. Now, I have a group of loving people that helped me feel a lot more comfortable expressing everything, to just be vulnerable. They completely trusted me to go in and do this album – even when they only had two songs to listen to when I signed. I was able to present it the way I wanted to present it, did my own visuals. I was left alone, but not neglected.”
It’s resulted in some of her proudest work yet. “There’s a song called Human Replacement, and I’m really scared about that one. I feel like it’s going to halve my listeners. It’s such a different sound, tonally speaking, that’s come out of me. No element is really melodic or floaty or pretty. I couldn’t talk about a long-lost love or Emily Bronte or something, it had to be toothy. But it’s so fun to play, and the subject matter is difficult. It’s all about not being able to go out at night as a woman, and we’ve really addressed that plainly in the video, so it’s just moments like that that I never could’ve anticipated.”
The album does eventually lean into a smaller sound towards the end of the tracklist. Marten explains it was important to her to cover both – as it’s part of who she is, too. “With every new song you put out, you’re adopting a new scripture almost – a new belief or personality. I wanted to make it clear that I’m not having a complete make-over. I’m not going to turn into a punk-rock princess all of a sudden”.
PHOTO CREDIT: Katie Silvester
Before I come onto the reviews, there is a fascinating chat with American Songwriter that I want to highlight. It is curious to read how Marten has been labelled as very waif-like and softly-spoken. It reminds me of Kate Bush after her first couple of albums and how she was perceived. I think female artists get pigeonholed and labelled too readily:
“Since day one, I’ve found that nature’s the easiest concept and subject matter to connect these metaphors with. Nature has very different, opposing personalities,” she further describes, “and that’s what I was experiencing at the time. This album is me understanding that I can have all those different personalities and still be one specific human.”
In previous musical lives, she’d frequently been “pinned as this bluebird, whispering waif person─of a girl really, I was never seen as an adult either─or I was not there at all,” she continues. “Quite often, I would get comments, especially meeting people after shows or in interviews, and they would say, ‘Oh, wow, you were not what I was expecting.’ Sometimes, the personality doesn’t align with the music you make. That’s really important to realize, especially for myself, and that meant I didn’t have to align with this prescription of who I was. Then, I had the freedom to make what I wanted.”’
Frequently, women are pigeonholed into particular categories as it relates to their work. “You’re either cutesy, folky, and odd-bally in a very happy joyful way or you’re severely depressed and tortured. Sometimes, you can be neither of those things and still be a lady with a guitar,” says Marten, a gentle scoff to her breath. Fellow UK artist James Blake, for example, wrote a revealing exposé in 2019, in which he stated how he would often “play down or skirt around how desperately sad I have been.” Marten can certainly relate, but makes an apt point: “I genuinely think that’s the only time a guy has had to address that.”
With Flora Fauna, Marten cues up sharper songwriting that’ll (hopefully) lay to rest expectations the media and her fans have forced upon her shoulders. As much as she has come to loathe the term, making the album was indeed quite “cathartic,” she says. “It was entirely necessary. I could feel it in my bones.”
Recorded over 10 days, alongside producer Rich Cooper, the record found Marten picking up the bass on a whim. She didn’t know how to play; in fact, she plucked its strings as she would an acoustic guitar. “I just decided to buy one. It came the next day, and I just really enjoyed making a different sound that wasn’t an acoustic guitar. Not knowing how to play meant my fingers were quite clunky, and I made very specific, rigid chords.These sort of slightly deranged bass riffs came out as the bed of every song”.
As with her previous two albums, Flora Fauna was met with positive reviews. Marten, even though her sound has evolved since her debut, has managed to remain hugely consistent and impressive. This is The Forty-Five’s take on one of last year’s finest albums:
“Billie Marten was just 17 when she released her debut album, ‘Writing Of Blues And Yellows’ in 2016. Growing up in rural Yorkshire, the flora and fauna of the natural world framed much of her early writing. In fact, it was really all she had to go on, still at school and living at home – as if gazing out at the wider world from behind glass.
On ‘Aquarium’, the final song on her new, third album ‘Flora Fauna’, Marten is no longer the girl behind glass, but the artist in front of it, looking back at her younger self from a wiser, louder – and occasionally wistful – perspective. “I need friends and I want lovers,” she sings as she moves through the adult world.
As an English singer-songwriter with a folk lean and a thoughtful, literary outlook, comparisons to Laura Marling were rife during Marten’s first forays into music. For both artists, the natural world is more than an influence – it’s a language for emotion. But in the five years since, amid many global, political, and musical shifts, Marten left home for London, and her sound slowly followed.
Her second album, ‘Feeding Seahorses By Hand’, documented new life in the big city: books, political observations, customers she encountered in the pub where she pulled shifts. And London continues to play a part on ‘Flora Fauna’, from female street safety to pigeons. “I am sick of branding and one-legged pigeons,” she reflects during a Tube journey, confronted with the city’s grubbier side.
London’s presence also filters through the album’s sound – and Marten’s attempts to break out of the sweet folky box of her first record. Only a few songs are led by acoustic guitar – ‘Pigeon,’ ‘Kill The Clown’, ‘Aquarium’ – but they’re propelled by something more urgent, accompanied by vivid strings or brisk percussion.
To describe ‘Flora Fauna’, Marten uses words like “sunny”, “abundance”, “joy”, “a green bath”. These songs certainly come from a happier, self-assured place, from jangly ‘Heaven’ to pop jaunt ‘Ruin’, the latter recalling Angel Olsen’s sprightly ‘What It Is’. The whispery vocals of Marten’s earlier records linger, but the writing feels more improvised and immediate, like a lively chat on the phone rather than a long, laboured diary entry.
She’s clearly grown comfortable to throw a little caution, though it just makes you want her to throw a lot more. The trifecta of looped vocals, synths, and keys on ‘Liquid Love’ sound unlike anything she’s done before – and unlike anything else on the album, which at times clings too hard to a certain timbre.
But there’s a dark edge to the album’s sunshine. End-of-days basslines and flickering synth structure every song, many of which deal with tough, uncomfortable feelings. Lead single ‘Garden Of Eden’ opens the album not with lush hedonism but an ominous bass riff, as Marten contemplates burnout and self-neglect: how we’re all too busy competing to live to actually live, a criticism surely relevant to the pressures and pace of her industry. Meanwhile, on the growling ‘Human Replacement’, a girl walks home alone at night. Everybody knows how that story can end.
This is the urban Marten, worldly-wise and far less green, but processing her surroundings with the same magpie gleam she possessed as a rural schoolgirl. “I’ve been growing leaf by leaf / dying for the world to see / ready,” she sings at the beginning of ‘Flora Fauna’. Ready, too, to put down roots in new sounds, colouring her future promise with shades beyond blues and yellows”.
I am going to end with The Line of Best Fit’s review of the magnificent, must-listen to and much-nuanced Flora Fauna:
“The collection of tracks display how adept at games of tension-and-release Marten has become. She pulls the listener close in songs like “Heaven”, “Ruin” and “Garden of Eden”, her voice immediately embracing the mike before arrangements brighten and relinquish their hold on the listener for oxymoronically spacious choruses.
Marten’s songwriting has matured beyond the trepidations of youth, building on Feeding Seahorses by Hand’s first hints of urgency. “Creature of Mine” opens with the grim “Old Mother Nature says it’s all getting worse”, echoing the songwriter’s long-standing concerns with our relationship with nature - one she cherishes so much she named her album after it. She also sings about the fear of being outside at night as a woman in the ominous “Human Replacement”, a track only made more potent by the tragic death of Sarah Everard in London in March and the subsequent national outpouring of grief and anger.
If album closer “Aquarium” and its sparse instrumentation, alludes to her bare-bones debut, most of Flora Fauna is devoted to entirely new musical ventures. Following Feeding Seahorses by Hand’s experimental variations of the folk music Marten roots her craft in, Rich Cooper - who also produced Writing of Blues and Yellows - and Marten are willing to take compositions one step further.
For one, there’s the alt-rock menace of “Human Replacement”, a strange beast whose production tricks bear resemblance to that of another Billie and her brother Finneas. From there we’re led into “Liquid Love”, a ticking bedroom pop lullaby that sounds inspired by the lethargic end of James Blake’s catalog, and then into an incredibly refreshing juxtaposition of oriental riffs, a buzzing electronic backdrop, and a melody that reminds of indie folk-rock superstar Sharon Van Etten’s recent work in “Heaven”.
Three albums deep into the game, Marten has grown into the artist she is today with more trial than error. Radiohead reminiscent standout “Kill The Clown” is the perfect case in point, weaving audible threads of improvisation that blur the line between jazz, folk, rock and pop. It’s a rich tapestry of sounds that comes straight from the heart. That might be Marten’s secret ingredient: no matter how left-field the compositions are, whether warming or breaking, there’s always a lot of heart in the music”.
One of my favourite albums from this year, Flora Fauna is the third from an artist I have been following and admiring since she started her career. I will follow Marten’s progress with huge interest. She is a phenomenal songwriter and one of the best lyricists in the country. Flora Fauna is the Yorkshire-born musician…
IN full bloom.