Review: Brittany Brooks, Lend Me Your Hand

It’s hard to imagine a better litmus test for overall musical accomplishment than an album written alone and then recorded alone in single takes with additional inputs coming exclusively in satellite form from others also siloed at home. While it’s tempting to call Brittany Brooks’ Lend Me Your Hand a pandemic album in execution if not theme, one senses the Ontario multimedia artist might have done it this way anyway, just because she could. 

Quiet, contemplative, candlelit and skipping gracefully between country and folk, Lend Me Your Hand puts its money on storytelling, mostly of the relationship kind, leveraging Brooks’ acoustic guitar and clear, unfussy voice to tease out tales of heartache and hope in places at once familiar to listeners (Montreal, Saskatoon, Lake Ontario) yet specific to Brooks’ scenarios.

The rewards are disproportionately rich, with abundant banjo, fiddle, and pedal steel — the latter notably added by Toronto ace Aaron Goldstein — ramping up the twang quotient. “Man on the Road,” a ballad and duet with David James Allen, sounds like something Johnny and June, namechecked within, might have unfurled in the 70s while making doe-eyes at each other.

Anyone mid-breakup or otherwise feeling vulnerable is warned to brace before queuing “Throw Me a Bone” (trust me on this one), the album’s starkest track sonically and lyrically but arguably its most emotionally arresting and delivered in a kind of defeated whisper that kneecaps the soul. 

Brightness bleeds through the cracks elsewhere — the cheerfully upbeat, fiddle-boosted “Mulberry Tree,” the vividly sketched title track. But Brooks grab us by the heartstrings again with “Only Sometimes,” which appears to conjure a woman slowly realizing her girlfriend status is more part-time that previously believed. And here we thought we loved Brooks mostly for her outstanding Parton and Pearl logo design.

Lend Me Your Hand was released August 28, 2020. 
Listen to it here.

Brittany Brooks is a singer/songwriter and multi-instrumentalist with Niagara roots.