In that slightly piecemeal, textbook-January way, Buzz’s first New Welsh Music column of 2024 gathers up a few late-November and pre-Christmas treats that got missed in the rush to buy gifts from the petrol station. The result = a full complement of sterling domestic sound.

BITW

Rehearse (Klep Dim Trep) is the third album under the Bitw name from this solo-with-pals project of north Walian Gruff Ab Arwel – previously of surf-rockers Y Niwl, who proved that music can be both Welsh-language and instrumental. Gruff sings here, and in English to boot, on 10 songs of keyboard-weighted, intermittently stringy grownup indie pop that takes a turn for the Orange Juice in Pretender and might appeal to fans of Sufjan Stevens at other times. Steven ‘Sweet Baboo’ Black contributes flute and clarinet, arguably the most valuable member of Bitw’s supporting cast in doing so, and I am also compelled to note that there are 17 different options on Rehearse’s Bandcamp page to purchase this album and/or merchandise relating to it.

COCODUBZ

“Digital artist – producer – NFTs” states the Twitter bio of the Cardiff-based Cocodubz, but she’s not posted for two and a half years so let’s give her the benefit of the doubt and assume she is not still being scammed by JPEGs. She has, much more recently, released a three-track EP titled Ohm which has a really nice line in meditative late-00s dubstep and clashing sinogrime: Optimal, the closing track here, feels like it could have come out of that whole scene with Mr Mitch and people like that. Beforehand, the title track skews closer to the sort of black hole drum’n’bass the UVB-76 label releases and Odyssey splices tasteful bass wobble and trilling arpeggios.

DAVID COOPER ORTON

Ten new ‘pieces’, if you will, by Cardiff-located solo guitar guy who has a few dozen previous releases on his Bandcamp and who I’ve reviewed at least once before, albeit several years ago. Suspect David Cooper Orton’s basic vibe – droney, quasi-new age instrumentals which nevertheless disquiet in a psychedelic way – is more my bag now than it was then; certainly I’m feeling What Just Happened…, the album in question. “Created and manipulated via Chase Bliss MOOD and blooper pedals, and extemporised melodic material,” writes Orton, and I’m sure that’d be interesting if I knew what it meant, but his bouncing between jazz odyssey noodling, ambient blissout and rawer, almost Manuel Gottsching-like electric heroism sounds AOK to this bozo.

DON LEISURE & AMANDA WHITING

Welsh jazz linkup alert! Aly ‘Don Leisure’ Jamal has produced drum’n’bass, dubstep and hip-hop in his time, and indeed remains a beatcrafter first and foremost, but his jazzer’s ear for melody and instrumental interplay is heightened by this seven-track collaboration with Amanda Whiting, a harpist who teaches the instrument at Cardiff’s Royal Welsh College Of Music & Drama. Beyond The Midnight Sun (First Word) fuses Whiting’s mellifluous virtuosity with Jamal’s languid drum breaks and dusty sample manipulation; predominantly instrumental, UK soul singer Deborah Jordan enlivens two of the EP’s songs, Peace Of Mind in particular hitting as hard as it does smooth. If Beyond… was twice as long I don’t envisage it outstaying its welcome.

EUROS CHILDS

Every year since 2019, a few days before Christmas, Euros Childs has self-released an album, Thrips being the fifth and latest. None of them are in any way Christmassy, so we can but speculate about what his deal is here. He should carry on doing it, though, as the erstwhile Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci vocalist still has his songwriting smarts. Thrips comprises eight songs of intimate psychedelic folk, pop and country that feels a bit like some 50-year-old vanity-pressed LP whose entire pressing gets discovered in an attic (that’s a compliment, to be clear). The title track reminds me a bit of Roy Harper, perhaps oddly as I don’t think Euros is playing guitar on this, and All Of The Time is a lovely sort of minimal synth ballad.

FREYJA ELSY

Freyja Elsy’s first single came out two and a half years ago, and when I wrote of its “swelling grandiosity and intensely lo-fi intimacy” at the time, it was certainly a compliment, but her latest – Modern Artifice, a four-song EP – represents a giant leap in songwriting and production, to these ears. Vocal-led pop songs with a frequent if not constant folk cadence, Elsy favours electronic arrangements which have a superficially calming aura but eventually come to feel dark and prickly. It seems to draw on the 90s, too, but a very different strain of it to the item above: Everything But The Girl’s pivot towards club culture, Massive Attack joints like Angel and maybe the theatrical heft of Tori Amos.

RAINYDAY RAINBOW

Here’s another project I’ve spoken of warmly before, but which has returned with a markedly different sound: Rainyday Rainbow, Swansea-based solo venture turned band, with Masters Of The Cosmos, a six-song mini-album. Venomous Vines, which opens the set, rocks harder than RR have previously done – fried Oh Sees/Ty Segall metallic boogie – and though the group revert to a looser, jammier mode of psychedelia thereafter, it’s decidedly more ‘together’ sounding than previous output, which often sounded like it was barely managing to stay upright (I mean that in a positive way, but still).

SENDELICA

Ceredigion out-rockers Sendelica are back with another double-LP opus. This is a fairly regular occurrence, indeed Man, Myth & Magic (Fruits De Mer) is the conclusion to a trilogy of apparently ‘man’-themed concept albums that debuted in 2021, but I’m into the direction they’ve taken on this one. Four tracks, each occupying a side of vinyl (or totalling a CD’s capacity), eschewing the Gilmour/Gottsching guitar style often heard on Sendelica releases in favour of more calming motorik/electronics grooves: Neptune (The Hanged Man) is closer to Neu! or La Dusseldorf than I’ve heard from this band before, and the almost Swans-like dirge Magician Dawn devolved into strikes me as fresh ground too.

SLATE

After a few well-received digital singles, noisy Cardiffian indie rockers Slate have graduated to ‘something to confuse the grandkids with’ status by releasing their debut 7”, a two-song affair on the Brace Yourself label. Tabernacl is a bombastic gothic chugger with wind tunnel guitars and gravely intoned vocals which reminds me quite a bit of Six By Seven. No I do not consider it ‘cringe’ to compare new bands to older ones who were last relevant when the members of the new band were babies, if that, and I will probably do it again soon. B-side St Agatha is my pick of the pair, driven by Killing Joke-y drums but with a croonier singing style.

SPENCER SEGELOV & GREAT PAINTINGS

When Spencer Segelov started fronting his own band, 15 years or so ago, he had a really neat line in jittery powerpop/new wave which I always selfishly hoped he’d return to after an escalation to lavish Van Dyke Parks type stuff and more recent folk-rockery. You’re A Lighthouse, I’m At Sea (Country Mile), a new album with his band Great Paintings, isn’t precisely what I had in mind, but parts of it, including opening song Don’t You Know?, approach that. Elvis Costello could be considered a blueprint, stylistically speaking, in that Segelov can deliver the odd rocker but is as happy indulging his country or Great American Songbook tastes. Versatile an arranger as he is, though, …Lighthouse has a consistent personality.

EXOTIC CONNECTIONS & OTHER SUCH STUFF VOL 2

Ash Cooke’s Dukes Of Scuba label has hooked up with South Wales Improvisers to compile 10 tracks of contemporary Welsh experimental music, following up Exotic Connections part 1 which was released in late 2022. It starts strongly with some collaborative dark ambience from Observation Point & Susan Matthews, based in Monmouthshire and Carmarthenshire respectively, and continues strongly with drone-meets-spoken word, guitar wrangling, Dadaist noise, synth arpeggios and a one-two punch of woodwind-y free music by the Improvisers Ensemble and South Wales Improvisers (uncertain how much crossover, if any, there is between these two groupings) before finishing with the keening strings and trilling background chatter of Tri Yn Yr Lolfa by Peiriant. Lovely to have this creativity collected just so.

words NOEL GARDNER