Kirsty Merryn – Our Bright Night
Self Released – 24 April 2020
The follow-up to She and I, her 2018 album of songs about inspirational women, the New Forest born singer songwriter Kirsty Merryn returns with a new collection, this time based around “tales of the supernatural, the dying of the light and the land”. Our Bright Night was co-produced with Alex Alex who also contributes guitar, bass and synth and features Phil Beer on violin and Sam Kelly on vocals. Save for two traditional numbers, it’s all self-penned and, with stripped back arrangements, heavily focused on Merryn’s piano and voice.
A filmic piano prelude introduces ‘Twilight’, musically conjuring the transition from day to night, before the vocals arrive, the song closing with the lines “And they will turn me in your arms into an asp or adder/but hold me tight and fear me not, I am your own true lover/and they will turn me in your arms into a man most humble/so wrap me in your mantle tight and hide me til the morning”, a slightly condensed and altered snatch from ‘Tam Lin’ (or, if you prefer, Robert Burns’ O, I Forbid You Maidens A’). The track seamlessly flows into the bucolic mood of the traditional (unsuccessful) courting song ‘Banks of the Sweet Primroses’, Beer’s violin colouring the metronomic piano notes. From here, the piano takes us to Padstow in North Cornwall with one of the first songs she ever wrote, ‘Constantine’ is an Alex Alex duetted love letter to the celebrated surfers’ beach of the same name that reflects on what it has witnessed down through ages and the power of the sea over man.
By direct contrast, based on the idea of a traditional courting song, the jauntily uptempo ‘Mary’ concerns the damage that man has inflicted upon the natural world. The narrative of the song is set in a dystopian near climate-changed future where the suitor invites his lady to go walking on a seafront which has been tarmacked over, and the woods have been felled to make way for electricity pylons as he declares “‘I want you to see where the starlings once soared”.
Then, from the future, the album travels back several centuries with shruti box drone setting the stage for the title track, a vocally naked lament for the women, the nuns, who were evicted from their convents (“the king requires our home to make a bed for his new bride”) when Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries (history, naturally, only focusing on the monks), as she sings “come sisters, we must depart, our bright night gone, this new day dark” as many had to return to the harsh patriarchal system from which they had sought sanctuary. As with any good history lesson, it also has resonances with today and how many organisations are facing cutbacks that remove the social support from those it once served as a lifeline.
Not, as you might have assumed, a melding of three traditional tunes, the ethereal ‘The Deep/The Wild/The Torrent’ is, in fact, “a celebration of the mysticism and beauty of nature”, of which the title forms the chorus, inspired by a twilight visit to a clifftop clearing in St Ouen, Jersey, where a circle of trees overlook the sea, the title itself coming from Robert Macfarlane’s The Wild Places, recounting the description in a poem by a medieval monk from Ynys Enlli, off the Llŷn Peninsula in Wales, of “Swarms of bees, beetles, soft music of the world,a gentle humming; brent geese, barnacle geese, shortly before All Hallows, music of the dark wild torrent”.
Underpinned by a stabbing single piano note and rumbling drums, the second of the traditional numbers is ‘Outlandish Knight’, in which a woman outwits her serial killer, would-be murderer. And from murder ballad to “a love song for the anxious” with the soothing lullabying rhythm and musical box feel of ‘Little Fox’ and a lyric that borrows from the 18th-century children’s bedtime prayer ‘Now I Lay Me Down To Sleep’.
Sam Kelly makes his appearance with the hypnotic piano and drone ‘Shanklin Chine’. Kirsty unfolds the tale of a woman who, while walking on the Isle of Wight beach to the wooded ravine, is visited by her ghostly lover. Kelly plays the voice of the lover who, having died at sea in the Napoleonic Battle of Tamatave “in a blaze of gunpowder”, encourages her to jump from the cliffs to her death to join him, “her only marriage bed/on silt and broken bracken there she rests her head”.
A particular highpoint comes in the final stretch with traditional-styled, heavily percussive ‘The Thieves of Whitehall’. It tells the story of a man from the country travelling to London to try (unsuccessfully) and restore the fortunes lost to the misuse of power (and far be it from me to suggest any allusion to bankers), the number gathering force as it proceeds. It ends, prior to the ‘Dawn’ piano coda, which revisits the notes of the opening as the new day arrives, with ‘The Wake’, a hesitant piano introduction leading into a simple and timely ode to those who have passed on and a reassurance that they will meet again anon and until then “for as many days as I am granted here on earth, I will raise a glass to all who have gone ahead”.
A simple yet haunting album of emotional and musical depth that underscores both Merryn’s consummate musical craftsmanship and her articulacy of the heart, the night is indeed bright, illuminated by her shining star.
Order Our Bright Night via Bandcamp: https://kirstymerryn.bandcamp.com/album/our-bright-night
Photo Credit: Todd MacDonald