Noel Gardner brings you the best Welsh music that may have escaped your attention this February, including psychedelic old-timers, hot rap hopes and a postpunk single from Cwmbran excavated after 40 years of puzzling obscurity…
BAND OF CLOUD
Beginning this month with a return to a popular destination, the extended universe of west Wales cosmic couriers Sendelica. This latest project, Band Of Cloud, has in fact been folded into that universe – David Owen upgrading it from a solo project to a duo by enlisting Sendelica’s Pete Bingham to play his time-honoured spacerock guitar (among other things) on new album A For Andromeda (FRG). Its four tracks, each topping 10 minutes, are more lavalamp-gloopy and abstract in their arrangements than Sendelica, with looped spoken word vox and limited ‘rock’ influence beyond the feedback leaking from Bingham’s bleached-out psych guitar. It builds creditably on Owen’s previous Band Of Cloud release, roughly in the realm of 90s ambient heads such as The Orb.
BRRDS
David and Kerry Hughes, aka Brrds, are a married couple who live on an old farm in Pencoed, though they weren’t always married (few people can say they were, really) and their musical career began in Preston circa the late 90s, in a band called Formula One. Being the right age (just about) and demographic to remember Formula One’s fizzy post-rock, it was a nice shot of mild nostalgia to get Soon Comes Forever, Brrds’ second album, in the post from David himself. The duo trade in melancholy electronic pop whose frameworks are songwriterly, if you will, in the same way as a band like Saint Etienne, but has much succour for fans of analogue synths – which, says their bio almost implausibly, were left behind by the farm’s previous owners. In My Room, released in 2022 as a lathe 7”, is the moment where all Brrds’ ducks sound most in a row.
FNOOLS
Only a one-track digital single – hopefully preceding a lengthier release – but this column is always happy to hear from Newport duo Fnools, whose roots are in the city’s (or town’s as it was then) postpunk/UK DIY scene of the early 80s. Both members, Ken Moore and Steve Woodward, played together in Discount Chiefs, whose one single can be picked up for cheaper than it deserves. Fumes Of Bacchus, the new Fnools song, is a stoutly driving rocker in a mid-80s Britindie style – think Half Man Half Biscuit with keyboards and more swirly FX on the guitars – which I assume is about getting pissed.
JARCREW
The return of Jarcrew, a Carmarthenshire band whose style of sassy post-hardcore is strongly associated with the early 2000s – as, by extension, were they – has been welcome if sporadic, with one or two gigs a year on average and no new recordings. Until now, with a four-song EP titled Ghostie: self-released and self-recorded, with the latter stat perhaps accounting for a punkier, more lo-fi sound than their sole studio album (which itself was remixed after its initial release). Opening song Saturday Boys most closely resembles the sound Jarcrew had going on back then, while Ghostie’s latter two songs both seem to use drum machines and/or post-production making Rod Thomas’ human drumming sound like that. Ray Romano consequently lands in synthpunk/Devocore territory, which is a nice fit for Jarcrew.
JUICE MENACE
Juice Menace’s set in her home city of Cardiff in early February might at the time of writing be my favourite 20 minutes or so of live music in 2023. She’s a really talented rapper with a distinct individual style and a natural crowd rapport (this mainly came through when she had to adlib due to her DJ’s equipment going titsup) as well as a bunch of class tunes like this latest one, Pink Notes. I say ‘like’ but it’s something of a break with her previous releases, pairing her with a bouncier-than-your-average tropical house track that sounds like it wants to get played in continental clubs this summer if not before. Pink notes are £50 ones, by the way and in case you were wondering.
MARLENE RIBIERO
If you recognise Marlene Ribiero’s name, it’ll most likely (by the law of averages) relate to the psychedelic group Gnod, in which she played bass for several years. At present, she lives in Pontypridd, where this solo LP has come together, although its component parts date from a fair few years and locations. Toquei No Sol, issued through the Rocket label under her given name following some previous releases as Negra Branca, is some really special experimental pop worthy of losing yourself in. Its arrangements are spacious, but there’s plenty going on, from dub techniques to lullaby-like singing to folk instrumentation to the sampled sound of a most insistent rooster. Forever, romantic dreampop with a sort of Julee Cruise vibe, feels like something that has a big audience waiting to discover it – you never know!
MAGUGU X LE MOTEL
It’s not far off a decade since Cardiff MC Magugu handed his debut EP to me, since when he’s built on his initial Afrobeats/rap hybrid sound to grace a ton of (most often, though by no means exclusively) grime and drum’n’bass tracks. I would say it’s deserved, except he deserves to be known even more widely. The latest Magugu release, Kindness Weakness, is a linkup with producer Le Motel and label Maloca, both from Brussels. It pairs his endlessly listenable deep-registered vocal style, his Nigerian origins still very much intact and a lyrical tack of positivity and self-improvement, with music that skips from dubby garage/house to shivery bassweight and more percussion-forward rattlers.
TARA BANDITO
Tara Bethan Williams’ musical alias is a nod to her dad, north Walian wrestler of yore Orig ‘El Bandito’ Williams – his death in 2009 sparked the songwriting bug in her, and many years down the line, Tara Bandito’s 10-song self-titled debut album has resulted. (She’s been busy enough in the intervening years, for the record, including various S4C presenting gigs and a slot in Charlotte Church’s Pop Dungeon band.) Her musical mode is theatrical electronic pop whose production choices are often quite modern-sounding, as on the bass-heavy hip-hop-influenced Croeso Y Gymru, but which always feel indebted to the various spectres of glam rock, disco, showtunes and Madonna. Unicorn, the album’s penultimate song, is notable for Tara not only claiming to possess a unicorn horn, but also pledging to use it to sexually penetrate any nabobs of negativity who cross her path.
VARIOUS: CARDIFF GETS SPLATTERED
The title of this four-song compilation 7”, released on Swansea’s R*E*P*E*A*T label, references the multicoloured ‘splatter’ effect on the vinyl pressing as well as the fact that none of the bands on it are from Cardiff. Hopefully this won’t spark a more violent animosity between the two cities than that which already exists, not least because an 11-year-old apparently came up with the title. Anyway, on Cardiff Gets Splattered you get Helen Love sounding refreshingly like Helen Love; The Mudd Club doing two-person garage rock a la The Courettes; Femmebug landing somewhere between early 80s synthpop, later 80s tweepop and modern-day pop-punk; and finishing with shimmery alt-rock from Private Party, whose name is unlikely to endear them to whoever designs their gig posters.
VIOLIN SECT
This is a 12” EP by a band from Cwmbran, who existed for maybe a year in the early 1980s and released two of the four songs here as a single during that time, and I’ve had my mind blown that it exists. Not because Violin Sect were playing especially groundbreaking music, although it’s really good: postpunk with clonky woodblock percussion, an even bigger arsenal of dub FX than the average UK postpunk band of the era, and vocals that alternate between singsongy/high-pitched and talky/mumbly. Putting your music out yourself instead of hanging around for a label was very in vogue then, too. What’s remarkable, in four decades where punk records of all types (this style very much included) have been rediscovered, reissued and otherwise canonised to what seems like an utterly comprehensive extent, pretty much no-one appears to have had this on their radar, until US label Minimum Table Stacks sorted out this archive release. Also, I knew I knew the name of Violin Sect’s Hywel Pontin (he of the clonky woodblock) from somewhere – he was one of the main people at Cwmbran gallery Llantarnam Grange from the mid-90s until a few years ago. Two different types of highly respectable pursuits!
words NOEL GARDNER
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