Race Horses
Clwb Ifor Bach, Cardiff
Thurs 25 Mar
Maybe there’s something in the water. Either that or the west Welsh microclimate yields a bumper crop of magic mushrooms every year, leaving the locals with no option but to get off their heads, listen to a disproportionately large number of records from the 60s made by men wearing capes and form wondrously bizarre psych-pop bands.
It’s a fairly straight line from odd-pop north-west-Waleians Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci and Super Furry Animals to Race Horses, all displaying a love of melody and madness in equal measure. Race Horses open tonight with their recent single, Cake, a piece of melodically-buoyant, four-part harmony featuring 60s-influenced pop that may or may not be an ode to the innocent pleasures of a nice Victoria sponge.
Rather oddly, there are times when Race Horses sound Super Furrier than the Super Furries – all falsetto “oohs” and melodic handbrake turns. It would be unfair, however, to suggest that they are merely derivative of their predecessors, however much they belong in the wonk-pop lineage. As illustrated by singer Meilyr Jones’s look – think the actress from Psycho in a biopic about 60s Brazillian psychedelic pop band Os Mutantes – their sound is indebted to 60s garage rock, suggesting they’ve consumed some of the excellent Nuggets box-sets from that era. Whereas both the Furries and Gorky’s spent a fair bit of time wistfully staring over the Irish Sea, Race Horses lack that bucolic aspect, instead concentrating on distilling their psychedelic leanings into lean three-minute pop beasts.
Race Horses finish tonight with a mod-ish cover of the Beach Boys “I can hear music”, and for a bizarre four minutes you’re inclined to wish that Brian Wilson had been brought up just outside Aberystwyth. Long live the west Welsh pocket of weird!