In November this year, Danish singer/songwriter Martin Baltser released his latest album, 'Pocket Poetry', and it’s everything I needed to bring me out of a dark place. Needless to say, it’s an album about love and everything about it: falling in, freaking out, enduring, and ultimately, accepting.
All throughout the album, Martin exhibits dense lyrics accompanied by a soft falsetto-singing that holds such great power to every word sung. If Novo Amor and Bon Iver had a child that liked playing around with electro-music, it would most definitely be Martin Baltser. This is not a surprise as Martin himself refers to Bon Iver as one of his musical influences. His formula for producing a song is by conjuring up oddly specific lyrics (such as moments of sweating like a freakshow at a 7-11) and blending it in with his beautiful, angelic voice that makes everything seem so intense yet peaceful.
'Fuck I Fell in Love', the first track on the album, reminds me so much of Bon Iver’s Blindsided. Although this song was particularly written by Martin mainly with an LGBT theme, it's easy to resonate with it regardless of your sexuality. 'FIFIL' is literally the song for when you realize you’re falling in love with somebody so unexpected, and all you could do is curse, panic, and basically just test the waters regardless of how much your anxiety is killing you. I mean, isn’t that what love is all about? To at least try?
Martin also has a signature of prolonging certain syllables to fit the musical composition of every song, which in my opinion, is perfectly orchestrated to leave a mark on the listener’s head as to which specific lyric needs emphasis in order to understand the song better.
Every track in the album is worth your time. From his song for his sister 'Louise' to 'My Samurai' which is about falling in love and growing old together, 'Pocket Poetry' may be entitled as such, but it’s definitely not something we should keep inside our pockets. It is an album worth retelling and sharing - something that we should wear on our sleeves such as the love that we all are so eager to give and receive.
Aside from writing songs, Martin also spends his time directing and producing content for his own lyric videos, adding a touch of delicate coherence between his songs and the visual representation the videos provide. He also regularly posts snippets of his life on Instagram where fans could take a deeper peek into the heart and soul of Martin Baltser.
Also find him on Facebook.