Brona McVittie: We Are the Wildlife
Company of Corkbots
While Irish singer-songwriter and harpist Brona McVittie has made critical contributions to recent albums by Keiron Phelan, Anne Garner, and littlebow (in which she partners with Phelan and Katie English), her solo debut We Are the Wildlife provides a much more complete portrait of this talented artist. Recorded at Corkbot Castle in the UK, the album presents an utterly beguiling collection of originals and covers of traditional Irish folk ballads. In fashioning the ten songs, she drew upon years of experience performing such material live plus a wide range of influences, from Tunng and Colleen to Alan Lomax and Satie. Never, however, does McVittie's music seem a pastiche; on the contrary, We Are the Wildlife is so personalized, it's as if she's wholly distilled her being into musical form.
Thematically, We are the Wildlife has to do with the interconnectedness of the natural and industrial worlds and muses on the human spirit in its fundamental form. The sound of the album is largely acoustic, centering as it does on vocals, harp, flute, strings, guitar, drums, and trumpet; electronics have been used but judiciously, more as near-subliminal sweetener than anything else. That emphasis on natural sounds results in authentic music that while never sounding less than fully contemporary could have been released decades ago alongside recordings by Steeleye Span, The Incredible String Band, and others of their ilk. Apparently, McVittie recently moved back to her native County Down from London, and the album's concentration on timeless folk material dovetails with that change. Certainly a deep connection to history and place are exemplified by her affectionate treatments of the traditionals “Molly Brannigan,” “The Jug of Punch,” and “Newry Mountain.”
McVittie's songs are distinguished by the softness and sweetness of her singing and the crystalline textures of her harp, which she's smartly refrained from altering electronically, and there's a pronouncedly pastoral character to much of it, making We Are the Wildlife play like a document of McVittie communing with nature. Some song titles derive from W. B. Yeats, another choice reflecting her ties to the timeless traditions associated with poetry.
The title track benefits not only from the purity of her unadorned lead but also the counterpoint her elaborate backing vocals add to the arrangement. Yet though the large share of the credit for the project rightly goes to McVittie, guests make significant contributions, too. Her entrancing rendering of the traditional County Down love ballad “The Flower of Magherally” is enhanced considerably by Anne Garner's flutes and McVittie's own multi-tracked vocals. Phelan's flute and Hutch Demouilpied's trumpet are evocative enhancements on a number of songs, while Myles Cochran's slide guitar and Richard Curran's strings flesh out the alluring soundword fashioned for “And the Glamour Fell on Her.” The album's sole instrumental, “The Vast and Vague Extravagance that Lies at the Bottom of the Celtic Heart,” is essentially a duet for harp and Cochran's slide guitar, while the blend of Phelan's flute and Curran's cello with her harp and vocals accounts for a large part of the magic conjured by “Broken Like the Morning.”
Her music is at its most entrancing in “Under the Pines,” where the pastoral plunge is at its deepest. Though it begins with the soft gurgle of electronics, the sound design rapidly shifts into acoustic mode, her spellcasting vocal reinforced by the seductive lilt and slow dazzle of the arrangement. So enrapturing, in fact, is McVittie's music on this splendid collection, you could very well find yourself imagining you're with her at the center of some hidden, enchanted forest when she intones, “Sing me your song / Under the pines.”December 2018