DORTHIA COTTRELL: WINDHAND Vocalist Streams New Solo Track ‘Take Up Serpents’
April 11th, 2023
 |
|
Dorthia Cottrell, vocalist of Richmond, Virginia-based stoner metal band Windhand, has made new solo track ‘Take Up Serpents’ available for streaming, which can be accessed below.
The title ‘Take Up Serpents’ comes from the Bible verse Mark 16:18: ‘They shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them; they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover.’ “Even though I don’t consider myself a religious person, I do believe that there are forces beyond current human understanding. I think we interact with those forces and they have an effect on us,” Cottrell commented. “This verse always stood out to me; I think love and faith in the unseen are deeply connected. I always thought this verse perfectly described the kind of omnipotent power that love is, and how it can inspire such a faith and devotion that can reframe reality.”
Dorthia Cottrell issues second solo full-length studio album Death Folk Country on April 21st, 2023 through Relapse Records.
Cottrell was raised in rural King George, Virginia, a town with less than 5,000 inhabitants. “This album to me is about painting a picture of a place where my heart lives,” Cottrell explains. “The title Death Folk Country is partly me describing a genre that fits the sound – but it’s also meant to be taken as a Naming, a coronation of the world inside me. Death Folk Country is the music and also the land where the music takes place, and the two have always been inextricable from each other.”
Cottrell grew up deep in a Virginia Pine forest in a house built entirely by her grandfather. “The only type of door I knew was made of plywood and had a hook instead of a knob,” Cottrell remembered. “We were excited to have our washing machine and dryer on the porch so we didn’t have to hang clothes up to dry in the winter. Our heat came from burning wood. If you didn’t cut the wood you didn’t get warm. If you didn’t make a specific effort for something, you went without it. And I loved it. I still love it. The smell, the air, the way it looks, the way it sounds. The way it doesn’t sound. The feeling.”
Death Folk Country “takes these nostalgic ideas of ‘home’ and confronts them with their own imperfections and darkness,” continued the press release. “There are things I don’t love about it too,” Cottrell said. “Dark things. Misguided ideas. Fear of things not understood. An altogether monstrous and violent evil that seeps unsuspecting and aloof (seemingly) into even the most (seemingly) innocent conversation. As I grow older, the things I love and hate about it only become more and more vivid and I often think about how to keep the two worlds apart–how to separate the divine from the evil and if it’s even possible.”
Death Folk Country was recorded and produced by Jon K. and Cottrell at SANS Studios in Richmond, Virginia.
The track listing is as follows:
|
|
01. ‘Death Is The Punishment For Love’
02. ‘Harvester’
03. ‘Black Canyon’
04. ‘Family Annihilator’
05. ‘Effigy At The Gates of Ur’
06. ‘Midnight Boy’
07. ‘Hell In My Water’
08. ‘Take Up Serpents’
09. ‘For Alicia’
10. ‘Eat What I Kill’
11. ‘Death Is The Reward For Love’
Directed by Richard Francis Howard, a music video was filmed for the track ‘Family Annihilator’. The track speaks to the unease and tension of Cottrell’s surroundings. “I had never played it before, I kind of brought it out of the attic,” Cottrell said of the song. Despite being over a decade old, ‘Family Annihilator’ spoke to the moment she was in. “With the threat of another four years of conservative offices in power,” according to a press release, Cottrell thought of family back in the South who would be voting, and remembered something her grandfather, a farmer, had told her years ago: ‘If a crop is diseased, you have to burn the whole crop.’ “‘Family Annihilator’ is a result of me wondering if the whole field must burn today, to save the flowers of tomorrow.”
The clip can be viewed below.
The track ‘Harvester’ can also be streamed below. “Where I’m from, and probably most rural places in the U.S., there is a strong Christian religious presence, whether you identify as being religious or not, and it was always my feeling that that has a lot to do with being surrounded and immersed in nature and every part of your life being at the mercy of it – even when it is merciless and brutal,” Cottrell said in relation to the song. “When you’re surrounded by something so vast and beautiful, the presence of ‘god’ and whatever that might mean to anyone, is blatant and undeniable. To me, ‘god’ is nature and God is Mother Earth, so also to me, when I’m back home or anywhere like that I feel deeply the presence of my own idea of spirituality, the wonders of it and the feeling of being something small in the face of something totally out of your control.
“That’s what ‘Harvester’ is about. Bad or good, in the patterns of nature you can see the patterns of all life, maybe even the patterns of the universe too, and that symmetry to me is god, and I’m grateful for it.”
Dorthia Cottrell’s self-titled debut studio record was released in March 2015 via Forcefield Records.
Promotional photograph by Richard Howard.
