Tanya Brittain – Hireth
TCR Music – 20 November 2020
One half of Cornish folk duo The Changing Room with Sam Kelly, Tanya Brittain has written and sung lead on both their albums and four EPs, but this marks her solo debut, albeit accompanied by a variety of backing musicians including Alan Pengelly (piano accordion), Mark Barnwell (guitar), Annie Baylis (violin), Mattie Foulds (percussion) and Ben Nicholls (double bass). Aside from her wholly self-penned material, there’s a co-write with Tim Rose, a lively mazurka instrumental (An Bluven Glas) by Alan Pengelly, and two traditional numbers. One of them and one of the originals are both sung in Kernewek, the native Cornish tongue. Although born and raised in South Yorkshire, Brittain is a Cornish language student and also sees herself as a Cornish cultural ambassador. The album title is itself Cornish and, like its Welsh counterpart Hiraeth, roughly translates as a feeling of homesickness, nostalgia or longing.
Taking the Cornish tracks first, it’s interesting how closely they resemble Slavic (to which end Brittian could be seen as a sort of Cornish answer to Daria Kulesh), something accentuated on the resonant piano accompanied Genev Dons (the title of one of her poetry collections, translating as Dance With Me) by an intro that echoes the original Russian tune on which Those Were The Days was based and which blossoms into a hybrid of Balkan-like mazurka and Weimar cabaret, though equally coloured by her own Breton heritage.
The other is the Cornish traditional love song Dy Sul Vyttin, a folk tune popularized by the late Cornish poet and folk singer Brenda Wootton, Brittain’s version opening on acoustic guitar before accordion takes up the gently waltzing melody.
Annie Baylis on violin, the album opens with her self-penned Just Go Quietly, another number with cabaret colourings and a lyric with an understated air of threat for an ex-lover who won’t take the hint (“Don’t push me, don’t take me for a fool/Cos I can kill you with a word… Don’t judge a book by the cover/Don’t judge a love by the lover/I’m a dark horse, and a strange force/And you’ll die quietly”) and a hint of Piaf.
It’s followed by the other traditional number, Oh Alas, starting out with unaccompanied double tracked vocals before accordion carries it up into a jaunty courtly sway about burning with a love that the narrator can’t bring herself to reveal that, while I can’t trace the source, suggests an Elizabethan provenance.
Something More Precious is a lilting remembrance of a brief May-December encounter (“Right there in that moment is where we belonged/But he was a young man, and my youth was gone”) that serves to rekindle the narrator’s spark (“with one loving touch my heart he repaired/No words were needed, no promises shared”). It’s followed, in turn by Father Forgive Me, her setting of words by Rose, an emotionally powerful piano-backed number about a child, hardened by years of abuse, summoning up the strength to leave their domineering parent (“I don’t know what it is that I’ve done/I feel your anger, can’t seem to do right…I’ve learned from your word and your hand/I can no longer stay here and live life in fear”), yet heartbreakingly asking forgiveness for doing so.
A song themed around a restless spirit (“Thursdays child has far to go/Much further than you’ll ever know, and I’m still travelling”), another piano ballad set to a walking beat, Girl on the Northern Line with its life is a series of train journeys metaphor has the air of classic English female singer-songwriters like Julia Fordham, Beverly Craven and Judie Tzuke. The album ostensibly ends on a similar musical note with Make The Change, a song about being poised on the edge of transition but hesitant to make the move (“It’s time, your wings are ready/Hold yourself steady/But what if I don’t make the change? Is it over?”) that is pregnant with both anticipation and fear of the unknown. Maybe about going solo? It actually ends with a bonus track, which is, in fact, the English version of Genev Dons, but subtitled Miss Havisham’s Lament, the lyric taking the perspective of Dickens’ abandoned bride to be, plagued by his memory as “In the castle of my broken dreams/Like moths around a flame/You just keep coming back again” but, finally, like the girl in Father Forgive Me, summoning the strength to say “Get back where you came from I bid you farewell/I hope you burn in hell” as she dances in the blaze that consumes them both. And, speaking of Great Expectations, suffused with the yearning and the longing of its title, this album more than fulfils its promise.
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