Noel Gardner brings you the best in new music from across Wales, including Amanda Whiting, Derrero, Swansea Sound and more!

AMANDA WHITING

First up on the new Welsh music front is Lost In Abstraction (Jazzman), the second album by Amanda Whiting, which has been online for a few months but is due out on vinyl around now, so this review may well be both early and late. S’OK, because music is timeless, man! I mean, this stuff pretty much is: Whiting, a south Walian harpist who teaches the instrument at the Royal Welsh College Of Music & Drama, approaches from a decidedly jazzy angle, both in her own exploratory solo trips and the musicians she enlists on this album. Notable among these are bassist Aidan Thorne, present in these last two columns as a member of Burum and Khamira, and flautist Chip Wickham, who comes from more of a headnodder hip-hop background but adds much to this lush, impressionist LP.

DEATHTRAPS

Appetite For Prescription (released on their own label Spirit Of Disaster) is the fourth album by Deathtraps from Newport, so it’s high time I reviewed something by them. They trade in smokebelching twin-turbo garage punk kicked out in a style I predominantly associate with the late 90s: Turbonegro’s Apocalypse Dudes, notably, as well as the likes of New Bomb Turks, Hellacopters and Nashville Pussy to name a few better-recalled acts. This stuff was pretty formative for me and in Deathtraps’ hands, it still does the biz now. Minor deviations from the template come with Candy Darlin’, which has the feel of an Iggy Pop solo joint, and the more specifically UK-sounding herbert-punk number Press Darlings.

DEEP HUM

The Haunting Of Oldbridge Field is a new EP – four songs, 25 minutes – by south Wales’ Deep Hum. Lloyd Markham, synth player of the trio, is also a published novelist, and it seems this release doubles as a piece of microfiction in which a drunk driver’s victim extracts spiritual revenge on his killer. Musically, The Haunting… is something of a change-up for Deep Hum: though their fluttering, elusive psychedelic style is still evident, with sparse guitar noodles evocative of either the desert or outer space, there are fresh production touches such as the lurid sophsitipop number Diesel Tainted Quavers (Reprise). No, I don’t know what that title means either, sorry.

DERRERO

Derrero started out in the late 90s as a south Wales group, part of a buoyant regional guitar-pop scene epitomised by the likes of the Super Furry Animals and, specifically in Newport, the 60Ft Dolls. From the early 00s to 2020, when they released third album Time Lapse, they were all but defunct, yet have now re-returned with a fourth, Curvy Lines, on band member Ash Cooke’s label Prin. Composed remotely (Cooke now lives in north Wales) and recorded in Canterbury, it’s a rich (not expensive) sounding suite of country and folk-informed indie-psych that intermittently goes a bit wonky/spiky/punky, as on Numbahh Wahnn and Salamander.

GUARDBAND

Here is a brand new band whose debut recording I’m most taken with, and think you might be too if you enjoy bleak slowcore, the end of 90s emo that was measured rather than chaotic, and post-rock that enjoys big riffs but isn’t windy or grandstanding. Guardband are a duo based in Cardiff; one of them was once in the rudely named Brown Wings and the hairily named Bear-Man, and though this takes a different tack retains a marked enthusiasm for the sound of distorted guitars. Debut release Akrotiri Station comprises six songs in 40 minutes, much like its best-known sonic touchstone, Spiderland by Slint – although I was more closely reminded of Engine Kid, Codeine and, on doomladen closing song Caveman, 40 Watt Sun. Strongly endorsed!

THE RUNNING MAN

I spoke to Doug Nicholls aka The Running Man late last year, ahead of the Christmastime return of his dormant Cardiff club night Sumo (this did happen, albeit delayed by five months) and he noted that certain pockets of modern dance culture had landed on a sound resembling Sumo’s favoured, but long unfashionable, nu-skool breaks. His debut EP, Make It Happen, does something similar – shuffling acid, abstract junglism, widescreen techno and, yep, breakbeats in a way that would have sounded plenty contemporary in 2002, yet still does in 2022. Some might say that’s indicative of there being nothing, or not enough, new under the sun, but I think there’s still mileage in mining old scenes that might have been overlooked by many.

SUNKEN GROVE

As Sunken Grove, Welsh border-dweller Ellis Green has notched up a small handful of releases: evocative, synth-based compositions usually a few minutes long. His latest, A Remote And Overgrown Past, is a single half-hour piece – digital only at the time of writing, with a cassette version planned – which will also be, it says here, his second to last release under this name. Like the ones preceding it, it’s very pleasant, albeit with sinister undertones: slowly unfolding, beatless keyboard washes that mutate over time while maintaining a dignified gravity. Pop it in your headphones on a woodland stroll this autumn, Green suggests – I think he might be onto something there.

SUSAN MATTHEWS

Carmarthenshire-based Susan Matthews was reviewed in an edition of this column nearly two years ago, and much of my brief attempt at description applies to latest solo release Lost In The Mist, again on her own label Siren Wire. Her compositions are still stark, deeply minimal and employ drone or sustain-type effects without any rhythmic bed: indeed, they make the subject of the review before this one sound positively jolly. On this occasion, the five tracks seem to be wholly or partly created from manipulated vocal samples, time-stretched and dusted with a bit of haunted-cave reverb and generally rendered mighty eerie.

SWANSEA SOUND / SIMON LOVE

The evening before I wrote this indiepop supergroup, yes supergroup [Swansea Sound] played a gig in Swansea for the first time. In fact, Huw the frontman reckons it’s his first ever performance in his hometown, despite a timeline dating back to the late 80s, with The Pooh Sticks. Mad! Anyway, they were selling a 7” flexidisc single there and you might still be able to buy a copy on label R*E*P*E*A*T’s Bandcamp page by the time you read this, or not. Swansea Sound’s sarky-but-earnest Indies Of The World is remixed in DIY synthpop style by a pal of Huw’s, Teen Anthems; on the other side, Simon Love (ex of Cardiff band The Loves) does his sassy Jonathan Richman kinda thing with Universal Love.

ZEUK

Quirks, a CDR on the Folk Archive label, is the third release by Cardiff musician Marc Roberts I’ve reviewed this year: one was under his given name and the others are as Zeuk, his main musical pseudonym. It’s not an ‘artist album’ as such, rather described as “songs, rare or unreleased, remixed”; a list of contributors is included, although doesn’t specify if they’re doing the remixing. Either way, on these 13 songs you get a mixture of the gothic folk psychedelia that was the default sound of earlier Zeuk releases; ditties with drum machines that approximate a very odd sort of synthpop; and semi-spoken word-y things that don’t fit either of those descriptions but could be described as experimental.

words NOEL GARDNER