Noel Gardner is your guide to what the diverse music scene in Wales has had to offer in May 2023. With the latest releases from the likes of Ex Cathedra to Godsticks and beyond, here’s what’s new in the Welsh music world.
EX CATHEDRA
Matthew Green, a London-based Cardiffian with a creditable list of bands past and present, has just released his Distorted Visions Becoming Clear, his second cassette as Ex Cathedra (he’s done some digital-only releases too if you think listening to music on cassette is stupid for some reason). This ostensibly electronic project opens with a curveball in the shape of Waiting Room, a very earnest-sounding guitar/keyboard/vocals number which I think may be his nod to much maligned subgenre neofolk. However, the beats arrive swiftly after for the remaining three tracks: first in a sort of EBM-via-trance framework, then an autotuned dreampop ballad over distorted electronics, and finally a bouncy number that’s like 00s mnml techno for the goth club. Some unexpected but cool directions here for the Welsh music scene!
GODSTICKS
This Is What A Winner Looks Like, the sixth album since 2010 by south Walian metallic proggers Godsticks, is released through the Kscope label like their previous two, and perhaps dials down the average tempo relative to 2020’s Inescapable. The musicianship is hard to fault, a two-guitar/bass/drums coalition interweaving parts with fluid panache and solos pulling matters close to trad-neo-prog than, especially, Tool, who Godsticks sometimes bear resemblance to. (Vocalist Darran Charles projects in a style halfway between Maynard James Keenan and Mike Patton, to boot.) Pre-album single Mayhem pays tribute to the slain heroes of the 1839 Chartist uprising in Newport, which is nice, and is the album’s apex of fiddly musical complexity.
GUILLOTINE DREAM
Not certain where in Wales Guillotine Dream consider their base, or if all three members are located here, but frontman Ian Arkley is somewhere in Carmarthenshire I believe. He’s been on the UK metal scene since the late 80s but made a sort of avant-folk album about 18 months ago which I really enjoyed, and I’m liking his goth-rock band’s new record Blades Fall too. Apparently, this is a rerecorded version of an album Guillotine Dream released and then decided sounded crap, but these nine songs seem pretty spot on if you like guitars set to maximally squealing reverb mode and vocals ranging from a glower to a snarl.
JAKE A GRIFFITHS
Hadn’t had the privilege of hearing Jake A Griffiths’ music until the Cardiff-based multimedia artist launched this album, The Recording Ruins Everything, with a live performance of it at the Shift artspace. I couldn’t make it to that either, but Griffiths’ general aesthetic – including social media pages where they uploaded a new piece of art over hundreds of days, and some terrifically weird and foreboding music – whet all my whistles. Nearly an hour of this stuff, guitar-based aural sculptures somewhere between early industrial, drone rock and improv noise, could test many mettles, but if it clicks with you I reckon you’ll wallow happily. You even get something at the end, Where, which has singing and in that sense loosely resembles a ‘song’.
LUNAR BIRD
Italian duo Lunar Bird emigrated to Cardiff about six years ago, I think for educational reasons and made twinkly quasi-orchestral pop which largely escaped my attention until they sent me The Birthday Party, their new second album. By this point, Roberta Musillami and Eliseo Di Malto have moved again, to Bristol, but let’s not hold that against them or their phalanx of many-layered vocals and peppy, vaguely Disneyfied arrangements. Assisted by a few Italian guests including indie-type Giorgio Tuma and jazzer Giuseppe Magagnino, the results sometimes approximate a more synth-forward take on the big-horizons alt-rock melancholia Mercury Rev and the Flaming Lips scored hits with nearly 25 years ago, although I’d assume Lunar Bird are working on a fraction of those bands’ budgets.
MAŁGOLA, NO
Małgola Gulczyńska, a Pole resident in Cardiff, plays in the bands 100% Rabbit and Live, Do Nothing, and records music solo as Małgola, No. Her second album, 2022’s Jaskinia Chrabiej Czaszki, has been re-recorded in the ‘chiptune’ (i.e. 1980s computer game music) style and titled The Cave Of Llord Skull, which is an approximate translation from Polish (as are the track titles). I for one find it most entertaining and soothing to listen to! Not sure how chiptune music is most commonly created nowadays – guessing with plugins etc, in a way that bypasses most of the technological pitfalls one would have encountered 40 years ago – but the melodies are bold and gleaming, and I feel like I’m on a quest.
MEGZBOW & VINEGAR TOM
Difficult, I imagine by design, to find hard info about this collaborative tape between Megzbow & Vinegar Tom, but there’s no way I can pass over something called Welsh Noise Vol. II, released by Kent experimental label Brachliegen Tapes and purporting to be “a mesmeric ambient noise poem built from the recordings of everyday life in [Pembrokeshire hamlet] Thomas Chapel”. If my limited intel is accurate, I think Megz is the west Wales local who made the recordings before she and Tom (aka Dominic) edited them into this soup of pitch-shifted voices, complaining animals, the crunch of rural detritus, mournful pianos and horns… Lovely fuzzy sounds, and evocative, even if not necessarily of Pembrokeshire.
PROCRASTINATRIX
More village experimentation courtesy of Toby Godden aka [Procrastinatrix], who lives in Abercraf near Ystradgynlais and makes complex, atmospheric electro/IDM at what seems like a fair rate – about a dozen albums and EPs uploaded to Bandcamp in the last three years. The sound palette of Projectional Identification, the latest, ranges from jungle-adjacent breakbeats to sweeping, ambient synth sections, with more linear efforts at clubworthy tunes having a likeably cold, almost metallic efficiency (Pentacles, Insurrection). Procrastinatrix is due to play his first live show, in Cardiff, on the same day I’m writing this review, and I hope there are plenty more to come through big hulking soundsystems.
RITUAL CLOAK
Ritual Cloak’s six-song Vanished In Transition (Bubblewrap), an EP running to nearly half an hour, finds Cardiff duo Dan Barnett and Andrew Sanders on a moody, cinematic rock-meets-electronica tip much like the one on their previous releases. At least, that describes parts of it. Elsewhere, there are efforts to remould wider influences in their own image, such as Left Behind, which is inspired by Western psych/rock inspired by Indian music, if you follow. The title track enlists a trumpeter and clarinetist for an excursion into ambient jazz which the band liken to Pharoah Sanders (no relation), though a celestial ECM Records-type feel comes through equally audibly, and agreeably, for me.
VALLEY LINES
Cardiff-originated electronica label Machine. return with an EP by Valley Lines, an alias of Christian Gates. I reviewed a release by him under another name, First Third, about a year ago, but for the four-part iO he’s reverted to this older handle to reflect the differing style of music therein. That said, I recall Valley Lines sounding quite different to this too, closer to straight-shooting techno/electro than what transpires here. Averaging under three minutes per track, there are rhythms and melodies on display for sure, but both unorthodox, deconstructed even. Some synth parts are almost vaporwave-like when heard in isolation, but coupled with abstract beat patterns and digital plugin crunch hint at IDM leanings.
words NOEL GARDNER
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