REVIEW: Billie Marten Provides a Musical Swaddling on a Rainy Evening
08/02 @ The Egg, Albany
Photos by Catherine Windover
“The intimacy of the theatre worked to her advantage, letting her simple and wispy but lush alto register reach back into every corner of the space.”
If the coziness of a rainy day could be distilled into a single concert, it would be Billie Marten’s performance this past Sunday at The Egg in Albany.
Before the British songstress took the stage, the evening began with a short set from singer-songwriter — and Catskills resident — Keenan O’Meara. Wearing an embroidered jacket, blue jeans, and high-top loafers, O’Meara’s opening number was sung in a tone that would have easily found its home around a farmhouse campfire at midnight in late October. His second song of the evening, “Hailey’s Comet,” taken from his newest record, Bathe In The Everlasting Light (an album co-signed by and featuring engineering from Sufjan Stevens), featured his signature swift fingerpicking that accompanied both his baritone range and floating falsetto. The number might easily be featured in the opening credits to a movie about a newlywed couple on their honeymoon in the woods. His lyrics were poetic, existential, and about as sprawling as his fingers across the fretboard for some of the fancier-looking chords of the evening. “Lately my mind is a hospital bed,” he sang plainly. His songs were focused on everyday struggles that are, of course, symptoms of larger cultural afflictions. O’Meara was particularly chatty as well, with a joke about tuning for 20 minutes and letting us know he had a burger waiting for him backstage from a restaurant whose name he couldn’t remember and no one in the audience could figure out.
A baby cried out lightly and was swiftly taken out of the theatre by its mother, carrying the child in a sling on her chest. O’Meara was unfazed.
Kate Martucci, Marten’s bassist, joined O’Meara on “A Little More Time” before Billie herself took a seat beside the opener for the final song, “When I Sleep.” The trio’s harmonies were reminiscent of The Andrews Sisters or something out of a Golden Age musical. O’Meara’s set ended and I felt oddly comforted by the experience. Perhaps it was the nostalgia for a time when three-part harmonies were more prevalent on the radio, or maybe it was the fact that it had been raining on my drive to the concert and I was in the mood to be swaddled — musically speaking.
The house lights came up for a brief intermission. Sitting in the last row next to the soundboard, I looked to my left. The baby was back. And so was Sufjan Stevens. They must have slipped in after the lights went dark. Makes sense, though. The baby was O’Meara’s, swaddled by singer-songwriter Meg Lui, his mother, who herself is releasing a record on Asthmatic Kitty, Stevens’ label. I was wearing a Sufjan “Illinoise” shirt, and I felt slightly embarrassed by it, imagining that Stevens not only thought of me as some kind of stalker who somehow knew that he’d be there, but a rude stalker at that for being on my phone through the entirety of O’Meara’s set. Look, I was just being a good concert reviewer; I was taking notes!
Putting aside this fortuitous celebrity sighting, I took stock of the 480-seat theatre in the house lights, which was still only three-quarters full. The embarrassment came back, as I thought of the internationally-famous Marten coming out to see the empty seats and thinking that Albany wouldn’t be a place that would show her love. The house lights dipped back down, Marten took the stage with Martucci and Andrew Maguire (drums/percussion), and almost immediately, more audience members filed in behind her. Phew.
“It’s bloody freezing in here. And I’m wearing a nightie,” remarked Marten, before going right into “Feeling” from her newest record, Dog Eared. Much of the album is focused on the big feelings of relationships expressed in metaphors about balloons, dogs, and nature. “I am figurative speaking/To tell you what I mean,” she sings on “No Sudden Changes.” The intimacy of the theatre worked to her advantage, letting her simple and wispy but lush alto register reach back into every corner of the space.
Marten seemed to settle in by the third song, “Crown.” Now taking up the electric guitar, she led the band in a muted-groove underneath the harmonized “oohs” of the song’s chorus, offset by short but satisfying guitar riffs. It was one of the many songs of the night that I’d wished had been twice as long. Each of the musicians felt like at any moment they could really let loose, but restrained themselves to the forms of the songs as they’re heard on Marten’s records.
And this, unfortunately, is my general criticism of her performance. Marten seemed to be beholden to her own writing. Having listened to Dog Eared in its entirety just hours before the concert, I can report that her live performance offered little in the way of deviation from the original production. Of course, the songwriting is wonderful, but I would have loved to experience something more than what I heard while I listened to that record at my day job. That being said, the performances themselves were quite good. Martucci’s simultaneous singing and walking bass lines were particularly impressive. I was also entranced by Maguire’s drum kit, which featured three sets of wooden chimes, an enormous woodblock perched atop one of his cymbals, a sonorous triangle, and to the left of his hi-hat what appeared to be a thick, hollowed-out branch with a drum head affixed to one end, taking the term “log drum” to its logical extreme. Maguire’s light, steady grooves, peppered with occasional auxiliary percussion could not have been more perfect for the wood-paneled theatre and Marten’s intimate lyrics, to say nothing of this apparent hygge I so desperately wanted to feel. And for not straying too far from the album, Marten knows how to work what she’s got.
Her band left the stage mid-set for several songs, and in one of these numbers, she hung on extra-long to several final syllables, letting them almost evaporate into the shared air, thick with the anticipation for their ends. I have to give a special shout out to whoever was running the sound board. These hushed moments were treated with special care, as were the loud ones (although what’s “loud” for both Marten and O’Meara is more of a “medium”), and nothing ever sounded muddy.
Being a performer who seems to refrain from too much onstage banter, Marten was able to channel what I felt to be the audience’s appetite for conversation into some of the best performances of the evening in her final few numbers. “Leap Year,” the evening’s final song — her band rejoining her — found Marten’s voice as the vessel for a quiet torment, carrying the weight of the heaviness of someone not quite ready to accept that her lover has gone: “I could have loved you…I could have held you.” Yet, it was Marten’s guitar solo in the song’s climax that seemed to best channel this feeling. In a performance filled with so many words from two technically and emotionally adept songwriters, finally being given the space to be enrobed in sound alone was exactly the swaddling I’d been looking for.
