THE PITCHFORKS
Weirdly, just before writing this review I was googling for something else that took me to a regional blogpost about The Pitchforks from four years ago, when they were a covers band in the Rhondda. These days they “take inspiration from bands like the Arctic Monkeys!” and, with the help of the Forte Project mentoring scheme, have a new song, Afflictions: bombastic jittery indie with a very faint postpunk echo amidst its “woah-oh” backing vox and rapid snare cracks. NG
CHEW
Chew is also on the Forte Project scheme, also from the deep valleys (Cwmfelin near Caerphilly) and, as a hip-hop-meets-grime MC, I have to assume ploughs a lonelier furrow in that part of the country. He’s accrued a decent CV already, including putting out a mixtape with multiple producers two years ago, so it’s no surprise that a strong individual voice shines through on Rainfall, a confessional track delivered in unvarnished chatterbox MC style over a languid beat larded with sped-up soul samples. NG
SUNS
Really don’t understand why you’d give your band such an eyeglazingly boring name as this Swansea trio, whose brand of shoegazing indie is grandiose, maybe a little overreaching and digging well-mined territory – but not, despite my general antipathy to this sound, boring. Suns juggle Verve swells, Jeff Buckley vocal drama and Smashing Pumpkins fuzz-metal riffs, and if that sounds tolerable to you they do it very adeptly. The extremely limited three-song tape Suns released in spring might be worth serious wedge in the future. NG