Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10
If we are fortunate, privileged beyond almost anything the world can throw at us or endow with is mystery and reveal, then to stand as adults and still be able to see love in the eyes of the one we call Dad is to know somewhere we have inherited that man’s reason, trust and hope. To many abandon this, striking out on their own, never realising that by walking away, so too does the soul of the one who helped raise us to be of equal footing in Our Father’s House.
Language is emotive, too many people get hung up on the way that they expect to hear a moment of beauty in a language they understand, preferably their own, and for millions it is a sadness they carry deep in the foundations of their soul that they cannot comprehend the hope of love that is being expressed. What doesn’t change is the music, the true joiner of all who seek beyond the pale words and sometimes shallow sentences, music heard in your father’s house is just as important as it is to the stranger who may have knocked upon the door and found peace within.
Welsh chamber-Folk pioneers VRi showcase this feeling of enlightenment and beauty as they take on the complexity and often complicated mix between community and the music of the Chapel, the hybrid religious backbone that has dominated the Welsh valleys and which routed the arts and folk scene as one of a heresy against their God and yet quite happily reaped what they wanted and reworked them into hymns. There is no doubting the serenity of the songs on offer by VRi and the dedication to the music that now has a shared heritage in the album Ty Ein Tadau.
We don’t need to understand the words at our hosts’ table, we just need to appreciate the way the sound gathers us to its calling, we might not believe, perhaps even visibly shun the words of those who preach in Our Father’s House, but as moments of joy carried by songs such as Ffoles Llanttrisant, Cyw Bach, Clychau Aberdyfi, Taflu Rwdins and Breow Kernow, what comes across in this expertly delivered album is one of acceptance, of inclusion, and whilst you might not follow the conversation, you cannot but help be pulled in and feel the warmth of language.
A marvellously produced recording, Ty Ein Tadau is an eye-opener into the world denied to so many as they close their ears to what is in effect a rare moment of creative beauty.
Ian D. Hall