Hellawes: The Enduring Relevance of Some Celtic Traditions

February 10, 2010 by admin
Filed under folk, folk: folk rock, folk: neofolk, rock, rock: classic rock, rock: goth

The album under consideration here, although quiet, wholly acoustic, and markedly introspective, results directly from the Russian folk-rock tradition. More explicitly, Hellawes is the stage-name or alter-ego of Natal’ia Nikolaeva, frontwoman of Mel’nitsa, arguably one of the most influential folk-rock outfits in Russia. We showcased Mel’nitsa’s most recent album, “Wild Grasses” (Dikie travy) back in April 2009, at which time we noted that Nikolaeva has a PhD in Indo-European Studies, with – not surprisingly – a focus upon Celtic and Gothic languages. As a result, she has since taught at both Moscow State University and Dublin’s Trinity College.

Her academic interests spilled over into her private life after 2004, when she married an Irish diplomat.

Hence the jewelry.

This love of all things Celtic can be further justified as a logical extension of older traditions in Russia. Scottish and Irish legends certainly informed the discographies of several major rock bands towards the end of the Soviet Union (most notably Akvarium); myths of hope and all things holy offered consoling tales of magical change in a neighboring, frozen nation. For the same reasons, one could say, Russian romanticism had turned frequently to Scotland in the 19th century as a place of similar paysage and – therefore – kindred spirits. It’s not at all uncommon today to hear Celtic fiddles hop and skip through the backdrop of a “Slavic” song at Russian folk-rock festivals.

Climates and – therefore – cultures have overlapped in two lands where knitting needles sell in large numbers.

Hellawes, aka Natal’ia O’Shea, took to the stage last month with her new Russo-Celtic album “A Leopard in the City” (Leopard v gorode). The official launch in Moscow, as reported by the Russian press, started late because of the kind of weather that Scots and Slavs know very well. O’Shea turned immediately to the audience, in order to apologize for a late start to the show.

She made an ironic reference to the frequent inclusion of magical themes in her repertoire: “I was finally able to cast a spell and stop the snow,” she said. “But then I forgot about Moscow’s endless traffic jams, black ice, and wet weather.”

Plus other seasonal burdens.

Another comment preceded the concert’s first chords. O’Shea referred to the recent tragedy in nearby Perm‘, where a nightclub fire had claimed the lives of many young music fans. “People have been calling me all day on the phone and asking whether we might be postponing the concert because of a mourning period. Personally I find it hard to believe that the deceased would want anything [like a musical event] to be canceled ‘in their honor.’ I believe – conversely – that we might help them somehow by doing something. I suggest we observe a moment of silence.”

And so these new songs, inspired by absent times and spirits, were dedicated to the recently departed souls of the Perm‘ fire. Not wishing – in the same vein – to turn these songs into ugly, civic declarations at a time when life’s transience was so patent, O’Shea made another comment. She wanted to explain that this concert was itself equally fleeting; it was a modest expression of musical intent, born of the desire to evoke various absent souls.

“We made a special effort to get the stage ready today… I don’t know whether we’ll do anything like this again.” Looking at the temporary structures around her, she then added: “I only hope that everything stays in place and doesn’t collapse.”

As the concert continued, O’Shea began to work her way through a wide range of Celtic harps: “People often ask me why I’ve got so many. Personally I think a musician should have a lot them… just as shoes, jeans… or children! Some of the harps are better in large concert halls; the kind of places that have good acoustics. Others – with the same design, but smaller in size – are suited for playing in a pub, say, where people are sitting around with a beer. Then there’s a third kind – the electro-harps – and you’ll see them as the evening goes on!”

Multiple instruments, each a variation upon a central, handcrafted theme, were needed to evoke an equally enduring topic of mystical absence. None of these tools would manage a perfect, confidently static expression; only in unison could they bring their ineffable object of desire a little closer. At least for a few moments.

This paradox – of using audible tools to approximate a melancholy, vacant spirit – is clearest in the album’s fourth track, which is a translation of “The Withering of the Boughs” by W.B. Yeats. The poem operates along two parallel lines; its narrator lists various spiritual places and ghostly forms of which he is somehow aware. They exist somewhere nearby – in a vague, unnamed and unnameable location – since the poem’s second theme concerns the constant inability of speakers/writers to evoke such realms with language.

Speech does not allow an escape from material existence into anything spiritual; quite the opposite. Words, language, and the logic thereof are harbingers of death and demise. Noise becomes synonymous with negation.

The poem’s second stanza reads: “I know of the leafy paths the witches take,/ Who come with their crowns of pearl and their spindles of wool, / And their secret smile, out of the depths of the lake; / I know where a dim moon drifts, where the Danaan kind/ Wind and unwind their dances when the light grows cool/ On the island lawns, their feet where the pale foam gleams./ No boughs have withered because of the wintry wind; The boughs have withered because I have told them my dreams.”

This same conviction – that silence trumps wordiness – surely explains the album’s artwork, shown at the top of this article: a covered head accompanies a position of prayer. That same physical position, however, is far from traditional; the singer’s hands are placed behind her back, either in a gesture of private, secluded worship (hidden from view) or as a strange and ominous inversion of canonical supplication. The new album’s ninth track, after all, is an instrumental entitled “Dracula Reel.”

As Yeat’s poem suggests, when we negotiate the world of unknown souls and spirits with language, error and/or inversion is often possible. Words will lead astray, to places where boughs wither.

These often beautiful songs, in total, seem a fitting expression of how Russian rock, in its frequent use of a Scottish and Irish heritage, often aims to comprehend the central dilemma or paradoxes of Yeat’s text. Just as the poet felt that hushed silence or prayer was a better conduit to places where the “dim moon drifts,” so Natal’ia O’Shea finds the musical and visual raison d’etre of Slavic (folk-) rock in a very quiet acoustic recording.

It seems entirely fitting, therefore, that as the concert came to an end in Moscow, O’Shea congratulated everybody on the day’s state holiday, an old Soviet festivity in honor of civic airlines (December 7). Just as the romance of Soviet flight was always tied to parallel efforts in the space program, so O’Shea’s words are seemingly dedicated to individuals positioned between material limits and the ineffable romance of spirits and states unfettered by gravity.

These same people are grateful for a little inspiration or support from a preceding, sympathetic generation, be they distant Celts or Slavs next door. It’s an uplifting influence.