Another 10 new Welsh music releases get highlighted, appraised, mulled etc by Noel Gardner for the end of April, whisking you from Ponty psych-pop to Radnorshire jazz-folk – and that’s just in alphabetical terms, to say nothing of all that’s going on between those two reviews.
Ponty zoomer Y DAIL travels back to the 1960s for his debut album
Press bumph for new Welsh band Y Dail’s debut album Teigr includes a one-word quote – “fantastic” – from one Richard Davies. There are undoubtedly many Richard Davieses in Pontypridd, where Y Dail – aka Huw Griffiths – is from, but this one was in an American band called Cardinal, and if you know of them you may appreciate the value of his endorsement at the top of this new Welsh music column. You may also like Teigr and its 13 songs of breezy retrograde psych-pop, rattled out with a sonic authenticity that belies its creator’s 20 years alive. There are flashes of country rock, powerpop, UK twee and tropicalia, with Griffiths switching between Welsh and English; occasionally, as with a song titled My Baby’s In The FBI, this all feels a little too much like cosplay, but the tune quotient is through the ceiling.
Jessica Ball’s EYE project mixes doom riffs with shoegaze textures
Saw what I think was the debut gig by Eye, back in summer 2021; it was definitely the first live performance I’d seen for the thick end of 18 months, so this band have positive associations for me to start with. It seems the band, founded by Jessica Ball after she moved from Wrexham to Cardiff, have spent much of that interim period working on debut album Dark Light (New Heavy Sounds), and it’s turned out well: 10 songs of psychedelia with a pop heart, shoegaze/Cocteaus gauziness and intermittent flare-ups of the heavy riffing Ball was hitherto associated with, as signer of north Wales doom metal band MWWB. In Your Night is a prominent example of the latter tendency and where Eye really hit their stride.
THE HONEST POET: soul, rap and spoken word on five-song EP
The five-song Love Complexity is the first release of substance by The Honest Poet since 2021, when he released a debut album during a year on the Forte Project industry mentoring scheme. Per the Cwmbran-based Jamee Summers’ chosen artist name, his vocal style sits at the midpoint between hip-hop MCing, soulboy croon and captive-audience spoken word; on Made Me Stronger, the EP’s closing track, sparse 2-step beats (courtesy of Cardiff producer Minas) leave THP partly resembling the sort of ballads UK garage singers did in the early 00s. Elsewhere, there are two features on Love Complexity, with the interlude by Rowen Brittany on No Good my personal pick – here, she’s the poet as Summers locks into full r’n’b mode.
Revered Welsh hip-hop head JOE DIRT returns with his second album
South Wales rapper Joe Dirt’s debut album Barrydockalypse seems to have grown into a real consensus hit among UK hip-hop lifers since it was released in 2017, which isn’t necessarily something I’d have pegged as happening at the time. One Madness To Another is his follow-up, mostly self-produced and with a small scattering of guest MCs from Wales and elsewhere. It sounds like an album that’s been crafted with due care, too, at the gloomier end of boom-bap sonically speaking (exception: Canis Lupus, which is almost rap-rock) and with a lyrical slant that suits this aptly, allusions to mentally dark times leavened by a sheaf of smart punchlines and off-kilter similes.
Teenage folkie from Pontardawe LAILA WOODWARD makes promising debut
Laila Woodward, based a little further west in Pontardawe, also includes a young persons’ music scheme – Future Blood, based out of the town’s Arts Centre – on her CV, and now the 17-year-old singer-songwriter is releasing her debut EP Hidden Blue on the SleepyTown label. It’s produced by Rich Thair, who you may know for his electronic/jazz projects such as Red Snapper; Woodward has contributed vocals to a more recent one of his, Dicky Continental, but her own songs are straight-down-the-line acoustic folk-rock on this evidence. She’s Blue is the lead track here, but while its singsong refrain might lodge in your brain the following two, My Mind Is Like An Ocean and Hidden, are darker, and to that end stronger, by my estimation.
MEGZBOW & VINEGAR TOM capture the strange sounds of Pembrokeshire
Cardiff’s relatively new Sgarab Tapes label secures the signatures of Anglo-Welsh sound art duo Megzbow & Vinegar Tom to release their second cassette of Pembrokeshire-originated, manipulated field recordings – made, at least partially, in one or more actual fields. I reviewed their first one just under a year ago in a new Welsh music roundup and was charmed by M&VT’s blurring of acoustic instruments with muffled human chat, close-mic’ed footsteps etc; you get at least some of that on this new effort, titled Field Mulch, but it’s being played live in a London venue (since closed), Iklektik, with tones of varied resonance coming from non-standard sources. If you can enter the necessary headspace the results are very involving.
Cardiff MC NIQUES’ new single is on a UK garage tip
The third and final act this April to get new music out with the aid of some kind of scheme – the Youth Music charity in this case – is Shanique Pearce aka Niques, a Cardiff rapper. Mate is her first release of 2024, and one she claims to have been tinkering with for 18 months or so; I think it’s self-produced (Minas, again, having been at the controls for some previous Niques tracks) and leans properly into her garage side. The beats are sunny and skippy in that classic UKG way, the sung vocals are kinda Destiny’s Childlike and Pearce’s south Wales accent comes through on the rap section. Worth your time!
Clandestine techno sorts PHASE4OUR continue their return to the fray
This experimental techno duo from south Wales, active in the mid to late-00s but dormant thereafter, continue a reemergence which began last year with an EP, Coordinates, which I both enjoyed and reviewed in a previous new Welsh music column. Language Barrier, again released through the Machine label, follows it up with five new tracks: two are labelled as remixes by Meson and Wrath, both associates of Phase4our, though if original mixes exist they don’t seem to be out there. Opening track c-Extriv is the most melodic, with a Detroit techno feel; The Dictatorship Of Vested Interests and ReHeard are more percussion-forward, the latter airing out Phase4our’s IDM leanings though retaining a dub techno-like sparseness in doing so.
Medieval harp improv from the incomparable RHODRI DAVIES
Telyn Wrachïod is the first solo album by Rhodri Davies for two years: the Swansea-based experimental harpist, perhaps Wales’ greatest ever free improviser, is less fervently productive these days than in the 2000s, but did play on The Ruby Cord album, by his sometime bandmate Richard Dawson, in the interim. This release’s title is Welsh for ‘bray harp’, a version of which Davies plays on these 12 instrumental pieces, and true to form he treats it with an indelicacy that would have surely seen his 15th-century equivalent boiled in tar. A case, perhaps, of acquainting oneself with melodic convention in order to break it, with the approach of (say) Derek Bailey introduced to medieval Welsh tradition.
TOBY HAY & AIDAN THORNE pair jazz and folk with atmospheric results
Jazz bassist Aidan Thorne has featured in these new Welsh music columns a couple of times in the last year or two, as part of Burum and Khamira. Folk guitarist Toby Hay, like Thorne a mid-Wales resident, also made an appearance in 2023, thanks to an album duetting with the similarly inclined Jim Ghedi. After A Pause, an album on Hay’s Cambrian label, actually predates all those three releases, in that it was recorded in 2021 (its physical editions have been crowdfunded more recently), and it’s alluring fare like the rest. Fully instrumental, Hay ventures from sparse fingerpicking to complex, almost freeform-sounding clusters while Thorne’s bass is a sturdy anchor, sometimes manifesting as a droning soundbed.
words NOEL GARDNER
