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Dog Eared - Billie Marten album review

  • dizzymaguk
  • 11 minutes ago
  • 3 min read
Words: Tom Gensler


Billie Marten is an indie-folk powerhouse. Today, Dog Eared, her fifth album, dropped,

and I had the pleasure of getting a bit of time prior to release to get to know this album.

With this being her first extended release in two years, off the back of her 2023 project

Drop Cherries, I was excited to listen, and what I discovered was a mix of Billie’s previous

works, with some striking thematic similarities to her 2021 release Flora Fauna, albeit with

a slight jazz leaning in parts.


Production-wise, Dog Eared is a spellbinding piece. Everything sounds magical, ehich is

achieved masterfully via subtle detunes or pitch shifts, things that do not make the sounds

too dissimilar from what they would sound like without the effects, but add a layer of

intrigue and notable difference that just creates a layer of mystery to the album. The whole

album sounds fantastic, nothing is out of balance and every element helps to really

emphasise Billie’s beautiful and soft vocals, and its extremely good to see production

being used in this way, it helps the album have a clear sound, one that slightly differs from

her previous works but is uniquely mystical.


Dog Eared is a very accessible album, as one could very easily listen to this with no

knowledge or anything of the world or motifs of Billie’s music, however in many ways it

feels like a spiritual sequel to Flora Fauna, her 2021 release. First of all, thematically, the

ideas of growth and the nature-forward lyricism, but also the senses of emotional

suppression and the releases that come around as of the suppression; on an emotional

level, Dog Eared plays with the idea of attraction and connection on a deep yet more

metaphoric level.


The Glass is probably the most romantically open this album gets. The line ‘dress me up

nice/ brush my hair/ turn me into dream’ is an excellent display of her romantic releases, of

which don’t come as clear as this in the album. The Glass, to me, represents her wanting

this romantic, idealistic love but seeking someone doesn’t necessarily want to improve her

but accept her for her, thus the line is sang in irony, a clever twist that by a chordal change,

signifying that all is not what we, the listener, believe. She does this across this album a

lot, using the chord structures and time signatures to fold and manipulate what the

audience believe; we are in Billie’s world now and we will experience what she wants us

to, in her own way.


Musically, there’s a slight leaning towards jazz across the project, found in abrupt and

dissonant chord changes, creating tension and slight upset in parts, again a tool used to

twist what we experience. Again, this links into the ideal of her album as a hyper-real

experience; it’s what we expect of Billie, her vocals and sounds but with subtle differences

and rug pulls, which allows us to connect with it in a very different way to before. The

amount of thought that has been put into this album’s story and themes and ideas and how

the music ties into that is really admirable, and its very impressive to see such a modern

artist doing this in such an innovative way.


However, the biggest standout across the ten tracks is Planets. Its slightly more upbeat,

and her vocals are less sparse than on other tracks. Its more indie, more in-line with what

we expect of Billie, however its simply magical. The soft drums combined with the

consistent plucking sounds and guitar crescendos, alongside soft chord makes for a

simply beautiful song, and again its just magical in every way, a true testament to her vocal

and songwriting ability.


Overall, this was a truly enjoyable album of a very high calibre, and I welcome the slight

tonal direction in this project, as everything makes for a truly enjoyable, spellbinding listen.


4/5

Standout Tracks: The Glass, Planets

 
 
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