Hand Of Kalliach release new track by track guide for ‘Corryvreckan’
HAND OF KALLIACH have released a new track by track guide for their new album!
Since forming in 2020, the Scottish melodic death/folk metal duo have quickly established themselves in the heavy music underground. Now, three years after the band released their debut album Samhainn, they have returned with their sophomore offering Corryvreckan.
On the album’s release day, we caught up with husband and wife duo, Sophie Fraser and John Fraser, that make-up the band to provide us with a detailed track by track breakdown for their new record!
“The name HAND OF KALLIACH is borrowed from the legend of the Cailleach, the ancient witch god of winter from Scottish Celtic mythology. One of the stories goes that she lives at the bottom of an enormous whirlpool, Corryvreckan, which lies between some of the western isles of Scotland, where John‘s family is from. As the herald of winter, she rises from the depths to wash her plaid (cloak) in the waters of the Corryvreckan. Once washed and restored to a bright white, she casts it across the earth where it lands as snow. This is done at the start of Samhainn (beginning on 31st October, which was the Celtic precursor to Halloween and the name of our debut album). Her reign ends as spring arrives with the festival of Bealltainn in May, and she turns to stone to await the next winter.
The Cailleach has a lot of malign connotations in folklore, associated with bringing death, loss and despair in winter. In one hand, she wields a staff that frosts the ground it touches, and in the other a hammer with which she shapes the mountains. Some tales speak of her exacting terrible revenge on hunters who cross her domains, luring them to the lairs of some of the more terrifying creatures in Scots mythology. However, she is also presented as nurturing creator deity, shepherding deer and other wild animals throughout winter, and fiercely protecting nature from the incursions of mankind. Commonly represented as an old crone/hag (indeed in Scots Gaelic ‘Cailleach’ literally translates to ‘hag’), she sometimes appears as a young woman, and is variously described as human-sized or a giant. Taking inspiration from all this, the music we make is centred around these dual concepts of benevolence and malevolence, all against the backdrop of the history, mythology and land/seascapes of the Scottish islands.
Whilst not commonly known, Corryvreckan is the third largest whirlpool in the world. Corryvreckan is first mentioned in an ancient historical Irish text from the 900s, Cormac’s Glossary. It states: ‘In the meeting of various seas, viz., the sea which encompasses Ireland at the north-west, and the sea which encompasses Scotland at the north-east, and the sea to the south between Ireland and Scotland. They whirl around like moulding compasses, each of them taking the place of the other, like the paddles… of a millwheel, until they are sucked into the depths so that the cauldron remains with its mouth wide open; and it would suck even the whole of Ireland into its yawning gullet. It vomits iterum {again & again} that draught up, so that its thunderous eructation and its bursting and its roaring are heard among the clouds, like the steam boiling of a cauldron of fire’.”
Three Seas
Three Seas introduces the Corryvreckan from its sources, i.e. the three seas that combine to form it. From the still waters of the Corryvreckan strait, the waters begin to pull and circle, forming the roaring cauldron and waking the Cailleach from her slumber of stone.
Fell Reigns introduces the eight ‘attendants’ of the Cailleach. There is very little written about them in mythology, other than that they are very ancient themselves, so in our telling of their story we cast them as eternal servants of the Cailleach brought back from the dead to serve again and again every winter. The Cailleach raises them from the deep on silver wings (she is also associated with silver and powers of the moon), and unleashes them into the skies to become winter storms, where they fall as rain, hail and snow back to the depths of the earth to await their next summoning.
Dìoghaltas
Dìoghaltas is ‘vengeance’ in Scots Gaelic, and the song follows on from the raising of the attendants in track two, and was written partly from their perspective – it is hateful, thoughtless and emotive, as you might expect an eternally bound servant to the god of winter would be. John‘s lyrics are all in Scots Gaelic, and pretty straightforward in content, but they are offset by Sophie‘s choruses in English which weave remorse and doubt into the narrative; the whole track is a commentary on the hollow futility of revenge.
Cirein-cròin
Cirein-cròin is the name of a gargantuan shapeshifting whale-eating sea beast. It was so large it was said to eat seven whales a day. There’s no consensus on what it looked like, so in our descriptions and artwork we opted for scaled serpent/worm like creature (think Jörmungandr from Norse mythology as an example). While it’s true size was impossibly massive, it disguised itself as a small silver herring in order to lure prey (including fishermen) before unfurling/expanding to it’s true colossal size. The lyrics are mostly around the transformation and the resulting Lovecraftian nightmare. The chorus that Sophie sings is a Gaelic child’s poem we added a melody to, that translates to:
Seven herrings a salmon’s meal
Seven salmon a seal’s meal,
Seven seals a whale’s meal,
Seven whales the meal of a Cirein-cròin.
Deathless
Track five continues the themes of grim immortality, focussing on the Cailleach’s eternal existence beneath the waves, alternating between surfacing and submerging in rhythm with the seasons.
The Hubris Of Prince Bhreacan
This song is about the origins of the name of Corryvreckan. The legend goes that a prince named Bhreacan who was in love with the daughter of the Lord of the Isles. The seat of the Lord of the Isles was situated on Islay, where John‘s family is from. To gain consent for the wedding, Bhreacan agreed to a test of courage which involved anchoring his boat for three nights in the Corryvreckan.
Bhreacan sailed back to his homeland and consulted the three Wise Men of Lochlan on how he could win this challenge. The Wise Men advised him to have three anchor cables made: one of hemp, one of wool, and one that had been spun from the hair of maidens. Bhreacan has his servants create these, returns to Corryvreckan and anchors his boat. On the first night, the hemp rope snapped, and on the second the wool one. On the third night, a violent storm swept across the sea and the last rope, whose strength lay in the purity of maidens’ hair, was torn apart. In his final moments, Bhreacan realised that the maidens were perhaps not as virtuous as they’d led him to believe, as he and his boat were engulfed in the whirlpool. In our telling, the ‘maidens’ acted in concert with the Cailleach to gift her a new groom beneath the waves. The name Corryvreckan means ‘Bhreacan’s Corry’ – in Scots Gaelic ‘Bh’ is pronounced ‘V’, and a ‘corry’ is a large scoop-shape hole in a landscape.
Unbroken You Remain
This is probably the most uplifting song on the album, trying to find hope in shattered existence (ambiguously either from the perspective of an attendant, or otherwise).
The Cauldron
The Cauldron combines the references in Cormac‘s Glossary describing Corryvreckan as a cauldron with some borrowed Irish mythology – a legend of a magical cauldron in which dead warriors could be placed and then be returned to life. It describes the broken bodies of the attendants being returned to the Corryvreckan and being remade by the Cailleach, before being launched into the skies once again.
Of Twilight And The Pyre
The last song on the album describes the final rest of the Cailleach and her attendants. It is a mournful imagining of an end to the seasonal cycles, when finally their divine immortality ceases. The attendants are buried a final time, screaming out against the veils between worlds to return to her side. In the twilight of her existence, the Cailleach immolates in the fires of Bealltainn and ascends to the stars, while the attendants swear to follow her path and rejoin her.
Given all the above, our art direction was for the Cailleach to be pictured arising from the churning waves of the Corryvreckan whirlpool, in front of one of her silver-winged attendants with the massive Cirein-Cròin arching and twisting around the scene. The white of her plaid bleeding into the waters, and wielding her hammer and staff. Her face is shadowed, combined with her giantess form presenting an ambiguous figure of malevolence and benevolence.
Corryvreckan is out now via Prosthetic Records.
For more information on HAND OF KALLIACH like their official page on Facebook.
