Bria

The declamatory titled ‘Cuntry Covers Vol. 1’ (sic) strikes a passionate blow (below) at the heart of the patriarchal, straight, white ‘country music’ cabal, the Grand Ole (soap) Opry ‘n’ all. Like fellow Sub-Popper, the masked cowboy, Orville Peck (both Bria Salmena and Duncan Hay Jennings are permanent members of his band as well as being in their own group FRIGS), Salmena has half-gnawed bones to pick, feathers to ruffle, names to shame and ivory towers to demolish.

Feeling the oppression of 2020’s locked down, boxed in, closed off ways of ‘living’, the duo began turning inwards for inspiration to combat the effects of enforced isolation which proved creative and cathartic.

Contemporary is is as contemporary was, and country music, like folk’s truth-passing and cultural-code bypassing is a vehicle to recast, reinterpret, re-present and respectfully rage against the machine.

The cover version has long been an opportunity to discover, recover, uncover, repurpose and reflect past, present and presentimental concerns, potentially revealing hidden levels, unseen surfaces and new-found depths of both re-iteration and re-interpreter. A new approach and voice can illuminate the previously un-ruminated.

As a duo Bria expertly set about dismantling ‘standards’ (Mistress Mary’s ‘I don’t wanna love ya now’; Lucinda Williams’ ‘Fruits of my labour), adroitly addressing and reassessing pop hits (The Walker Brothers), enjoy a bout of polit-crit avant gardening (John Cale), all the while trimming the flim and jibbing the flab, weeding out the bad seeds to cultivate an ever fertile and contemporary cachet.

Beginning with troublesome (allegedly) and troubled (undoubtedly) troubadour (and Bob Dylan’s ‘favourite’ singer … apparently) Karen Dalton’s 1963 cabin-recorded ‘Green Rocky Road’, Salmena’s dusky, husky, catch-throat croak captures the lamentations and incantations of the trials and travails of a life on the tails, trails and on/off the rails. This leads into ‘in with the outlaws’ Highwayman Waylon Jennings’ ‘Dreaming my dreams with you’; on both songs Hay Jennings’s wailing, weeping guitar enhances the forlorn feelings of hopeful hopelessness and rueful recollections.

John Cale’s ‘Buffalo Ballet’ outlines the Old West tale of Abeline, Texas, scene of the overthrow of peasant workers who’d built the town and tracked the terrain by the moneyed classes and their militaristic hired hands. This rendition captures the transition from Edenic idyll (‘sleeping in the midday sun’) to everyday living hell.

Bob Crewe and Bob Gaudio’s ‘The sun ain’t gonna shine anymore’ (a 1966 UK #1 hit for The Walker Brothers) finds Salmena coming across like Chrissie ‘Pretenders’ Hynde. A melodious mixture of vulnerability and vigour, authority and rigour, lonely yet never alone.