RECENT WELSH MUSIC YOU MAY HAVE MISSED | REVIEW
Doing these extremely useful and public service-y columns in alphabetical order means, for June, that “recent Welsh music” begins with a guy who lives in Cornwall on a label based in New Zealand. Don’t bother me none, though, as the guy is Neil Sweet aka Anatomist and the label is Machine.Records, both of whom cut their teeth in the Welsh IDM scene of the mid-00s. Machine.’s Bandcamp page even uses the quote “Cardiff’s number one underground electronic imprint”. Great days! And Anatomist’s Come Closer, instrumental electronica equal parts spooky, clanky and melodic, is rolling back the years peachily too.
Cardiff four-piece Big Thing [pictured, top] are one of those bands whose music – chipper, jangly 90s indie revivalism, equal parts US slackerdom and UK foppishness – sounds like it could be enjoyed by large audiences if the chips fell nicely. They’ve been active in some form since 2017, but are entitled to think that had they been able to play gigs or do much else in the last 18 months, they’d be going great guns by now. Their new 7” on the Popty Ping label (I was getting to the review eventually, OK) features the lead vocals of Jennie Morris on punkier A-side Say When, Daniel Lewis on folk-tinged flip Eye To Eye.
One of only two albums in this month’s column, Into The Voice (Bard Picasso) by Blue City has actually been out for two months to boot. Send me some Welsh albums I guess. Blue City, who go by Blue City CDF in some places, are a Cardiff hip-hop duo who enlist plenty of guests on these 15 tracks (DJ Jaffa, Pun Ra and Genesis Elijah are names I recognise from wherever) and who favour stirring string samples, tweaked vocal loops and the sort of boom-bap style that’s ‘timeless’ in that it could have been released at any time since the 90s.
Brian Karrot is a Port Talbot rocker whose name derives from the 1980s band he was in, The Karrots. I think you had to be present there and then for that to mean much to you, but Brian is currently cranking it out solo, including recent single Ill Begotten Gains. I’m dead into this! It’s sort of psychedelic folk meets electronically-treated glam, with mad synth noises and vocals that are soft like very old leather. His other song released this year, The Sun King, sounds like Guided By Voices.
Released by the Bingo label, the debut EP by The Bug Club from Caldicot is another 7”, although at the time of writing possibly subject to pressing plant delays so the double LP of Zig & Zag rehearsal sessions could be ready for Record Store Day. Either way you can listen at the link above, where you will find ample reserves of singsong-y garage indie – sardonic and literate, sometimes groanworthy (some lyric about dad’s vintage porn on EP opener Checkmate), capable of big riffs but generally friendlier and apt to file between the Modern Lovers and Moldy Peaches, which is quite a small gap however you look at it.
Buzzard Buzzard Buzzard describe their latest song Warm It Up as a “B-side” despite it being a standalone song (released by the Communion label). Sure they have their reasons. It’s a little more plaintive and less beat-you-over-the-head rockist than much of their catalogue to date, with chiming Byrds/Teenage Fanclub guitars, japey lyrics built round an extended ‘amateur cooking’ metaphor and the faint twang of Faces-era Rod Stewart in Tom Rees’ vocal.
Don’t know a huge amount about Cut From Moons: real name Marc Davies, living in Cardiff but from Pembrokeshire, works in a library. Actually, that’s probably enough to be going on with, but while his music still maintains a veneer of mystery through its ghostly electronic ambience, self-released debut EP Nightly has left me keen to hear more. Tracers, Streamers goes big on the watery FX and stark, shifting synths, like some big 90s techno bod’s beatless sideline album; Bwci places dubby reverb front and centre and the closing title track has a proper minimalist creep. Very nice all round!
Ivan Moult’s [pictured, above] Steady Hands (Bubblewrap) is newly released but written a few years ago. It’s about growing up and becoming more sensible in preparation for starting a family, and if that sounds to you like something that might have been devised with the lyrical aid of a Christian youth pastor, the gently wheezing organ accompanying Moult’s folk-rock guitar and Nick Drakey croon doesn’t contradict that much. I’m actually more into this than I’m making out, or than the other song on this single, a cover of The Bangles’ Eternal Flame which feels like it was recorded in the hope of being picked up to soundtrack a dating app advert.
The legacy of colonialism in Welsh history is for various reasons less acknowledged than it should be, and while a paragraph-long music review obviously isn’t the ideal arena to correct that, it does bring me to this album by Khasi-Cymru Collective, whose sleevenotes mull the mid-19th century Welsh missionaries who uprooted much of the northeastern Indian Khasi people’s indigenous culture. Gareth Bonello is not a missionary, but he did visit the region on various occasions as part of his PhD, where he and a rollcall of locals bearing trad instruments recorded what became Sai-Thaiñ Ki Sur – The Weaving Of Voices (Naxos World). Bonello’s ever-agreeable voice and guitar style is dominant on maybe half the album, though it’s the raw Indo-hillbilly pluck of tracks like Mei Mariang and Ka Sit Tula that pull my levers hardest.
Minas has been around in some form for a few years, indeed it says here he recorded a yet-to-be-released album back in 2019, but new single Payday (Gutterbreed) is the first time I’ve listened to him with my ‘review head’ on. It’s pretty neat angry-young-fella rocktronica stuff, not without latter-day precedent but not easily categorized either. Live drums, dubby bass wobbles and synth riffs alternately distorted and twinkly back up James Minas’ intensely delivered lyrics about scoring off one’s dealer on credit and general lowdown young person living.
The Machine. label which started off this month’s column returns in the form of Stereo Minus One, aka Dan Haines Cohen – founder of the label, since moved from Wales to Wellington but on the evidence of Empties The Floor still dedicated to complex’n’crunchy abstract electronics. A blissful keyboard ambles through all five minutes, true, but the beats splutter and pingpong far more dizzyingly, with a punchier quasi-techno riff enlivening matters about two-thirds in.
I still don’t know if the band name SYBS [pictured, below] stands for anything, and in my arsey crusade against non-conventional capitalisation of proper nouns should maybe write it Sybs until I’m told. You don’t care, I know! Self-described slacker rock from Cardiff, SYBS have a new single on Libertino, Llygaid. It’s got a decidedly late-period Pavement vibe in its guitar tones (both the yawning countrified ones and the crashing riff sections) and Osian Llŷr’s vocal delivery; press blurb makes note of the presence of tubular bells, although it took me a few listens to pick them out.
9 To 9 by Cardiff’s Tom Auton may or may not be intended as a four-decades-on riposte to Dolly Parton – for one thing, it’s not about his day job but spending all day working on a song – but it does for blues-rock what 9 To 5 did for country: discofies it in flamboyant and faintly absurd fashion. Featuring at one point the… unforgettable lyric “like a lady in a brothel, I hand you another bottle,” it feels somehow like an early 80s American radio hit by a new wave or AOR band who went for the pure pop jugular.
Finally, you may have noticed there is a continental football tournament on at present, although when Paul Sheppard from Tonypandy FC emailed me Football Forever, their “not the official theme song” of Wales’ Euro 2020 campaign, it came with a preemptive note suspecting I am no fan of the game. He guessed wrong, indeed I am publishing this column in the morning so readers can listen to everything in it before the games kick off in the afternoon. Tonypandy FC are Rhondda heads, some of whom featured on the Set Phasers To Spünday EP I reviewed a few months back, and here they obliquely celebrate the sport of kings with four minutes of trippy leftfield funk-rock on a Happy Mondays tip where the title is sung with suitable gusto. As I write, Wales’ second group game is yet to be played and I will refrain from editing this closing sentence after the fact to reflect the result.
words NOEL GARDNER
