MotherLand, her fourth studio album and her first since 2019, finds Daria, celebrating ten years on the UK folk scene, drawing on a myriad of life changing events in the intervening years, specifically becoming a mother and the Russian invasion of Ukraine, symptomatic of an increasingly unstable world. As such, the title pointedly stressing the two words, the songs (three of which appeared on her Eve EP) embrace themes of exile, war and protest alongside those of salvation, escape and joy, roaming from the Caucasus Highlands to Everest, Scotland and Ukraine.
Produced by and featuring multi-instrumentalist Jason Emberton (save for two tracks by Stu Hanna) with core musical contributions from violinist Katrina Davies, Jonny Dyer on guitar, mandolin, bouzouki and bass and Odette Michell on backing vocals, it opens with a deep dive into Russian history with the breathily sung steady bluesy strum and drum beat of ‘Ataman’ which, from a first person perspective, recounts the true story of Alyona of Arzamas, a spirited 17th century Erzyan woman (“a healer, a killer, a witch and a nun”) who defied both the oppressive Tsarist state and the dictates of gender to reject convent life and become the leader, their Ataman, of a rebel Cossack army. Although ultimately subdued, as she declares in the song “None could bend my bow, and I would bow to no one/Till my final breath a Cossack I will be!”.
Sung in her native tongue, that’s duly followed by her rendition of the Russian traditional ‘Cossack Lullaby’, Hanna on production duties as well as violin, bass, guitar and mandolin and Tristan Seume playing banjo, octave mandola and guitar, a gentle image of a Cossack mother lulling her baby to sleep and imaging but also fearing him growing up to go to war.
A second traditional lullaby of sorts, the six-minute plus ‘Lully Lullay’, is a steady walking rhythm, musically swirling reworking of the ‘Coventry Carol’, a dark telling of King Herod’s Massacre of the Innocents that, with her added words, becomes a musing on a mother’s all-consuming need to save her child, a ‘spell song’ of protection which, in her lines “Babies unborn and mothers torn/Such is the human game/Not some mad king in his raging/Just random chance to blame” has resonance with both events in Ukraine and the Middle East.
Sustaining the thematic thread, it leads into a suitably stark, musically glowering, passionately sung cover of Dylan’s ‘Masters Of War’ and, in turn, another number about the devastation such masters create, ‘Homeland’, again sung in Russian, being her translation from Ingush of a song by Khamzat Osmiev and set to a traditional tune, previously released as a single last February to mark the 80th anniversary of the deportation of the Vai’nakh (Ingush and Chechens) by Joseph Stalin in 1944, a lament for the deportees that yet combines longing and melancholy with a driving bouzouki and drums rhythm.
The second to feature Hanna, set to a tune by Duncan Morrison with the chorus by Angus Robertson, ‘Sea To Skye’ is an autobiographical memoir of her first visit to the island as a teenager, working, under some duress, as an interpreter for the Moscow Chamber Orchestra on tour and of encountering an elderly lady called Una MacLeod, returning 15 years later to find her still living in her cottage and being given a gift of song (“You had to pass on the song/You gave me your mother’s song/A song let me sing of the sea-note’s ring/A song of the sea to Skye/A song in the storm that breaks with the morn/A song of the sea-bird’s cry… Your mother’s old song through me is reborn”), underpinning the theme of mothers, children and legacies.
Another storysong of a historical figure, the slow waltzing shanty ‘Ignited’ tells of Ignatius Sancho, a Black man who, brought to England after being born on a slave ship and initially sold to a family in Spain, found favour with the Duke of Montagu and rose from his humble beginnings to find respectability, fame and fortune in 18th century England (“allowed a voice and a vote/A man of letters, music and merit/A man of standing on foreign soil/With seven children, happily married”) as an abolitionist, writer and composer but never felt he truly belonged.
A second cover, and again featuring Hanna and Seume, the melodically chiming and suitably Scottish-sounding ‘The Summer Of ‘46’ was written in 1994 by Robin Laing about the journey of Bonnie Prince Charlie as he sought to claim a foreign land as his own, the failure of his rebellion marking the collapse of his identity with nowhere to belong and nowhere to return, chiming to its theme of his chiming with Daria’s own hiraeth or longing for home.
It ends with, first, her own ‘Rise’, a stirring, musically muscular, piano-driven tribute to those who give up their freedom and lives in the cause of higher ideals, the lyrics referencing school teacher Leila Albogachieva from Ingushetia, an Olympic athlete and the first Russian woman to reach the summit of Everest twice who vanished while climbing Elbrus to record a video plea for peace, the message being “From a seed of hope/A flower always grows/And the truth will rise!”.
Finally, she returns to traditional roots for the timely ‘Ukrainian Lullaby’ which, sung in Ukrainian with a drone backing, metaphorically tells of two spirits, Dream and Slumber, who find shelter in a sleepy, snow-clad village sharing a hut with a purring cat and sleeping baby as, in the sleeve notes, she asks “has there ever been a single night in our entire history when every baby was able to sleep peacefully, free from any danger and safe from harm?”.
Ten years ago she was the Eternal Child, today’s she’s the Eternal Mother, long may she continue to give birth to progeny like this.
Mike Davies
Artist’s website: http://www.daria-kulesh.co.uk/
‘Sea To Sky’ – official video:
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