★★★★☆
Drop Cherries, the fourth album by Billie Marten, is one of pure acoustic beauty, from an artist evidently without the need to prove anything.Billie Marten’s Drop Cherries begins with sweet simplicity. ‘New Idea’ is merely the singer’s humming, set to the backdrop of acoustic guitar and light string work, which breathe in and out like the sea. It’s an intriguing opener that lulls you into the indie-folk fairytale of the rest of the record, in a similar vein as the first track on beabadoobee’s Beatopia, ‘Beatopia Cultsong’. This track is in fact a demo, as she’s explained to us, its title simply what Marten had saved it under on her laptop. And it’s such a place of creative chutzpah – without the need to impress anyone on her fourth album – that we find the singer-songwriter on this album. Once the humming subsides and the singing commences on the second track ‘God Above’, this approach is pronounced from the opening verse: “Who as I am like the toes on my feet / Always a gamble on who they might meet / Fresh are the flowers and air that is sweet / Bringing me back to you”.
Indeed, with themes of nature weaved in and out, Drop Cherries is a collection of tales of love and lust, told from a place of honesty. Like the portrait image of Marten on the album cover, there’s little she holds back, but stands authentically offering herself, her soul. Even the album’s title is a crisp, pure metaphor, with the gift of cherries symbolic of offering love, and of dropping everything to be with someone.
The other, more akin reference point to the album is Laura Marling, from both the light and wispy to the more troubled underbelly that can lurk in such a world of fairytales. Penultimate track ‘This Is How We Move’ could quite conceivably sit on Marling’s 2008 Mercury Prize-nominated debut Alas, I Cannot Swim; ‘Devil Swim’, meanwhile, could neatly slot into I Speak Because I Can, with its quietly devastating line “nothing left to cry about”.
In truth, though, such comparisons can be a fool’s game. And since the release of ‘Ribbon’ in 2014, before her fifteenth birthday, Marten has been charting a path of indie-folk delight of her own.
Two of the album’s best tracks are ones that have already been dropped, like cherries, into the world. ‘I Can’t Get My Head Around You’ manages to speak on something so universal in a manner that still remains original. It could almost be a country song, or at least be given a reworked treatment, with its smattering of drums, swaying acoustics and open storytelling.
This track is topped, though, by ‘Nothing But Mine’, which opens with a twangy accompaniment of guitar and piano before Marten’s twirling vocals on lines such as “I have faith in our love” and “All the dirt that you found” fall to the ground like leaves.
Recorded in Somerset and Wales, with Dom Monks on co-production duties (whose prior credits in fact include Marling, as well as Big Thief and Nick Cave), this is a record that reflects a getaway to the country air, as ‘Nothing But Mine’ rolls like the hills into ‘Arrows’, which in turn falls via gentle humming until settling on the piano opening to ‘Tongue’.
The album could be ever-so-slightly improved by another track of greater intensity (an ‘Alpha Shallows’ equivalent of I Speak Because I Can); if anything, to raise the stakes and accentuate the softness of the rest of the album. Not that Marten will care – nor should she. This is a record of sweet, honest soul-baring.
Among the raft of PR fodder that often gets sent in advance of album releases, Marten’s is an outlier, with words directly from her declaring: “You can either skate this album’s surface or dive right to the core. Your choice. There was no need to shout this time.” Much like Drop Cherries, that’s really rather beautiful. 
