Noel Gardner returns with another spread of new Welsh music from the margins from June 2023, including churchy minimalism from The Keeling Curve, Swansea rockers Kikker offering solidarity with the furries, and Rhys of Goldie Lookin Chain fame trying out his Welsh language skills…
ANDREW HAWKEY
Andrew Hawkey’s Hindsight CD comprises 17 songs recorded between 1969 and 2022, and was compiled to toast his 80th birthday, which was last year. Making this marginal folkie a surefire oldest swinger in town, whether that town be Llanidloes – where he’s been long-term resident – or this reviews column. This chronological collection, most of it unreleased until now, passes through psych-folk to folk-rock to synthed-up 80s fodder to blues kicked out in that hoary British way. Hawkey’s earlier modes should appeal if you like, say, Jackson C Frank or Roy Harper, and I was also tickled by Take Me, which combines new age keyboards with ‘sexy’ female vocals. Hindsight also has some of the most genuinely entertaining liner notes I’ve encountered for some time. Respect to an oldhead!
ANGHARAD
Swansea musician Angharad Jenkins, who mononymously goes by Angharad on record, debuted this spring with a song titled Because I Am A Woman. Its quick-succession followup, Postpartum (Libertino), establishes a conceptual thread: Because… was a riposte to notions of motherhood being incompatible with a music career, Postpartum’s lyrics run through some of the less lovely effects raising a small infant has on a mother’s body. Sung-spoken in grave tones, Jenkins is backed up by discordant, gothic postpunk with a sax-led coda not unlike The Pop Group – a 180° turn from that previous single’s polished disco. All of which means that a third Angharad single, or an album, could sound like almost anything.
THE CRAWLING EYE
Two-thirds of The Crawling Eye, Matthew Witherstone and Sean Davies, pushed my buttons right up into the unit last year with their other band, Ten No.6. For this one, the trio are completed by Witherstone’s daughter Regan – surely one of the least utilised familial combos in music, this. Seven-song mini album The Wretched Truth – released via the Shiny Vinyl label – is considerably less rocking than Ten No.6, except sometimes in a windswept harmonica-tooting folky way, and is at its strongest on Nobody Else and In My Head, where synth textures combine with Regan’s sullen vocals for some torch-song indie niceness. Reminded me a bit of Drugstore, if anyone remembers them.
GATED ESTATES
Gated Estates is an alias of mid-Wales-based Daniel Linn-Pearl, who also makes really nice guitar/violin soundscapey stuff as part of Peiriant. This self-titled debut album, which follows an EP from 2019, is thoroughly different to that, being 10 songs of jaunty, singer-songwriterly 00s indie with the default meat’n’spuds guitar replaced by melodic electronica. This, combined with Linn-Pearl’s lyrics (personal anguish, laments for the world as it is today, bathos wrapped in a cute turn of phrase) and vocal pitch and delivery, reminds me quite specifically of the music Martin Carr was making about 20 years ago, after he’d finished The Boo Radleys and moved to Cardiff.
JIM GHEDI & TOBY HAY
This duo have both been doing their instrumental folk guitar thing since about the mid-2010s: Hay, from mid-Wales, released Sheffield-based Ghedi’s debut CD on his Cambrian label, and following a duo album in 2018 they’ve reconvened for this self-titled followup. It’s issued through Topic, the granddaddy of British folk record companies (sidenote: I enjoy complaining about how they never touched any Welsh acts during the trad folk revival era), and it shows both musicians in possibly their strongest light yet. With Ghedi on a six-string guitar and Hay on a 12, the interplay touches on American Primitive styles, more Celtic-leaning melodies and some borderline new agey passages of cleanliness.
THE KEELING CURVE
Rhiannon Bedford and Will Frampton, who comprise The Keeling Curve, are Cardiff-based – Bedford, a violinist, is studying at the Royal Welsh College Of Music & Drama – and a real asset to the city’s experimental music set, even if their live performances are relatively rare. New EP Atoms On The Wall was however recorded in Essex village Bradwell-On-Sea, and there’s a psychogeographical lore to this info which adds to an already worthwhile 20 minutes. The duo recorded their parts in an ancient, spartan chapel, Bedford’s playing expressing elements of folk, early music and droney minimalism and Frampton weaving in electronic textures; multimedia artist Nastassja Simensky added field recordings from the village and there’s even some vocals by the Othona community, a small Christian sect who also use this church.
KIKKER
Five-song EP, with an extra track if you spring for the cassette version, by garage postpunkish Swansea sorts Kikker. I saw them play about three and a half years ago and liked it well enough, I think, but have paid limited heed since – Exoskeleton, this new set, is good though. Vocalist Jacob Winter has clearly internalised the nasal mutter of Mark E Smith, and the musicians are on their own Fall tip at least some of the time, although at certain points I think of Wire or Pere Ubu. Lyrically, Winter is often introspective and self-critical, with plural references to his anxiety and boozing habits; conversely, I enjoyed his declaration of solidarity with the furry community on Cringe Culture.
MOVEMENT81
This Swansea duo also trade under their actual names, Jason & Becky, and make multimedia art, of which Movement81 is a component. Musically speaking, two-track single Pride (three if you count a superfluous edit which halves the length of the title cut) is chipper IDM of the more melody-centric and danceable kind, comparable perhaps to The Black Dog or other early 90s-originated acts with electro roots (including TBD-related duo Plaid, who they’re supporting in Cardiff this week!). Conceptually, Jason and Becky claim to be inspired by Futurism, and its credo of allowing technological advances to guide artistic practice – in a modern context, this refers to AI, although it’s not clear if anything answering to that description helped to compose Pride or Bassic. I dig ‘em either way.
NOTEHERDER
Sax man and improvising skronker Chris Parfitt, who is Noteherder, lives in Bridgend but gets about a bit: next month he’s playing with Maggie Nicols in Caernarfon, in February he was half of longrunning duo Noteherder & McCloud live in Brighton, and I caught him in free jazz mode, dueting with Richard McReynolds, in Cardiff back in March. The latest Noteherder release, four-part EP Green, opens with a short burst of expressionist saxophone, but the two longer pieces that follow – Moss And Rain, then Leaves And Sun – are crepuscular, elusive and unjazzy. The imprecise percussive clicks that propel Moss… may well involve a sax, nevertheless, and Leaves… shuffles barely-there piano improvisations with fragile woodwind and throat singing, or something like it.
RHYS FROM GLC
Goldie Lookin Chain’s Rhys Hutchings, for it is he, uses the word “finally” in relation to the release of his Dim Sglodion album. Its opening song, American Movie, was uploaded to YouTube in 2011, so he’s not kidding on that front. “It’s a Welsh album,” he continues; “some of the words are in English but all of the music is in Welsh.” What transpires is 14 songs, recorded in fairly rudimentary manner and in a jangly glam-rock/psych style distinctly similar to early Super Furry Animals. Added to which are Hutchings’ vocals, which seem to be deliberately imitating Gruff Rhys. Not clear whether SFA themselves are a target for lampooning here, or the various Welsh language bands who’ve bit their style over the years. Could be a heartfelt tribute I guess.
words NOEL GARDNER
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