Billie Marten – Flora Fauna
★★★★☆
On her third album, Billie Marten sounds fed up. The singer-songwriter, known for whispering her words and using bare-bones production, has picked up the bass for a new record that packs a punch.
Since Marten was discovered on YouTube as a Yorkshire schoolgirl aged 12, words like “pure” and “pretty” have swathed her album releases: Writing of Blues and Yellows in 2016 and her 2019 follow-up Feeding Seahorses by Hand. On Flora Fauna, Marten, now 21, shakes the descriptors off like a wet, gleeful dog.
Flora Fauna is the singer’s first release since she was dropped by Sony in 2019 – a split she describes as “the best day of my life”. It’s an attitude that’s written all over this record. There is a new sense of liberation that manifests in noodling beats and an openness to experimentation that has been absent from her past music. Marten’s songwriting feels more confident than ever. On the alt-rock track “Human Replacement”, she laments the reality of being a woman out at night in a spoken word-esque delivery. “You’re just not safe in the evening,” she says. “You could be taken.”
None of this is to suggest that Flora Fauna is an unrecognisable transformation for Marten – across the album she stretches her voice into familiar, hushed shapes – but the record marks a clear evolution of an artist done with being called pretty.
Lord Huron – Long Lost
★★★★★
Are you pining for the open road? Dreaming wistfully of new horizons? Lord Huron have an album for that.
Long Lost, the LA band’s fourth record, is what you’d get if you set Fleet Foxes against the dusty plains and rugged vistas of the Wild West. It’s an album steeped in vintage-sounding reverb; built on meticulously crafted arrangements and masterful, elegiac storytelling.
Frontman Ben Schneider takes his cues from the lone rangers who’ve come before him. He sweeps the listener along on an exhilarating ride that explores heartbreak, solitude and regret. Nestled among the luscious slide guitar licks and steady percussion of “Love Me Like You Used To”, he emulates Waylon Jennings with mournful croons: “I’ve been lost before, and I’m lost again I guess/ But I never lost this feeling or this pounding in my chest/ I have travelled many miles, I don’t wanna walk no more/ Every road and every highway led me right back to your door.”
Despite its 16 tracks, not once does Long Lost feel crowded. The pace is unhurried, the phrasing exquisite. It helps that the instrumentation is so ambitious in its scope, conjuring vast territories that span the Hawaiian languor of “At Sea” to the sauntering challenge of “Meet Me in the City”. The title track is a shivery, thrumming epic with swooning cello notes, plinks of piano, and lyrics that speak of the deceitful nature of the American dream.
Outlaw country is rightfully getting a new lease of life with the emergence of country musicians such as Colter Wall and Brent Cobb. But Long Lost suggests artists outside the genre are just as enamoured by the possibilities it presents to explore modern America, cast with a series of flawed, gunslinging characters. Consider me lassoed. ROC
