Kelly Lee Owens’ first non-festival live performance in Wales takes place at the other end of the country to the one where she was born and raised (Cardiff University Students Union, to be precise), and can reasonably be called ‘long-awaited’. It would be less reasonable to say that this purveyor of dream pop-streaked techno melancholia rose without trace, but certainly, there’ve been many more loudly hyped acts of late, in electronic music and otherwise, who’ve achieved much less.
Her rural Flintshire origins are often invoked biographically and seem to have had two lasting effects. For Owens the (aspiring) musician, it spurred her into moving away – initially, in the late 00s, to Manchester, and then to London, where her indie rockish tastes were complemented and eventually overtaken by dance music. This first manifested in three vocal spots and one writing credit on Drone Logic, the 2013 debut album by her friend Daniel Avery, then a debut 12” of her own the following year. A self-titled album in 2017, on stylish Norwegian label Smalltown Supersound, was a critical rave, its swirling techno depths not wholly removed from the likes of Avery but with a more pronounced pop, or at least song-based, sensibility.
Inner Song, released a little over a year ago into a club music landscape reduced to home listening and so being played live for the first time this autumn, found Owens flagging up her Welsh identity more prominently. John Cale, an earlier beneficiary of the Welsh-village-to-London migratory path, supplies vocals on album centrepiece Corner Of My Sky; its bread-heavy video stars Michael Sheen. “When you leave somewhere, you realise the impact it had,” Owens has said of Wales.
Inner Song as a whole is both ravier and more accessible than Kelly Lee Owens’ debut album: vocal parts are pushed further up in the mix, while instrumental tracks vary from stout rhythmic thumpers (On) to hypnotic bleep/ambient rushes with a new ager’s sense of melody (Jeanette). For better or worse, this Thursday show at Cardiff University Students Union is set to ‘gig’ rather than ‘club’ hours, so what will the impact be in a big room through big speakers? Only one way to find out!
Y Plas, Cardiff University Students Union, Thurs 25 Nov. Tickets: £20. Info: here
words NOEL GARDNER
