Hana Piranha – Wednesday’s Child
Fourglove – Out Now
More usually found whipping her violin into a frenzy with her rock band, classically trained Brighton-based New Zealander Hana Maria is in a more restrained and contemplative mood here as, teaming with producer Jason Achilles, she switches to harp for a ten-track conceptual narrative of atmospheric balladry that will also feature a standalone illustrated book.
The unaccompanied 53-second Wander Wonder opens proceedings, followed, Achilles on piano, by the sinuous melody of Lullaby, violin not entirely abandoned, setting the scene of a tragedy in waiting with a young woman, Helene, inheriting everything she could ask from life, but also the enmity of others built up over the generations, cursed, in Sleeping Beauty tradition, at her christening by an enchantress. The same piano notes carry over into the instrumental West of the Moon as featuring, steampunk cellist Unwoman, events fast forward to her 18th birthday and falling totally in love with Soal. On then to the wedding and the Kate Bush-like gothic dramatics of Teeth, the harp striking ominous notes as Soal is taken aback by the physical changes to her face and, while his smile remains, there is now nothing behind it, plunging Helene into misery and melancholy, now a forgotten doll, dressed in black, alone save for her music.
Greek myth is evoked next in Eurydice, another stark harp and piano arrangement, that captures her seeing the vision of a cave from which her prince’s voice calls out “I’m waiting for you”, as she sets out to bring her love back. Playing icy harp notes, both on disc and in the storyline, If You Just draws her into the cave, losing all notion of time and place, before giving way to sleep, awakening, as the music swells, to realise the betrayal and that she is trapped in the darkness.
Changing musical styles for a slinky vocal purr with brooding piano bass notes and hollow percussion, How to Become a Queen sees her abandon the search for Soal in a determined effort to save herself and escape the tomb she is in, the piano and strings swarming around her. The harp sounding nervy, insistent notes, Heroine finds her mind now totally poisoned by the Underworld as, realising she has no power over Soal, Helene resolves to use her daughter as a means to gain revenge, Maria’s vocals echoing back on themselves as the scheme takes shape to the backdrop of discordant percussion.
And so then to the doomy piano chords of the jittery Wednesday’s Child, the lyrics littered with lines about dark imaginings, a sick mind and carcasses, but, interestingly, sounding an autobiographical note about being born in a hurricane, as the narrative builds to its climax.
It ends with the repeated pulsing harp notes, gradually joined by grieving strings, of Soliloquy and the realisation that, having destroyed everything by embracing the darkness within, the only thing that could have saved her was, sounding the album’s universal message, to love and be loved in return. Clearly an album for those with a penchant for dark mascara, crumbling ruins and who fantasise a hybrid of Scott Walker’s Soused and Kate Bush’s Hounds of Love, this is intoxicatingly haunting.
https://soundcloud.com/hanapiranha/west-of-the-moon