Last year, backed into an all-online corner, Buzz started running these columns each month, on the basis that there was recent Welsh music, and we believed you may have missed it. This is the 12th one, which makes a whole year of them, except not quite because the December one was a two-parter. Either way I hope at least one reader has discovered at least one musical act they like through them.
Ben McManus self-released a solo album, Old Goginan, last month; it’s his third, I think. He lives in Aberystwyth but got the bug for old timey American folk music, proper cornpone fiddle’n’banjo fodder, in Cardiff back in the day, and even went to the States and interned in the Alan Lomax archives. These nine instrumentals are expertly enacted but simple at heart – I don’t hear many overdubs here – with just that right balance of the mournful and the rollicking. The closing track is titled Jack Ate An Onion Like An Apple: write in telling us which serial killer shared this particular eating habit and win absolutely nothing.
One of this reviewer’s favourite Cardiff bands to have formed during lockdown – out of a pool of not many, but they’re really good – are Can Kicker, who play rad noisy punk that is sufficiently distinct from the rad noisy punk played by its members’ other bands past and present. They released a demo tape in spring and have followed it up with the demo tape’s cursed relative, a two-song ‘cassingle’. It’s a treat! Super-Ego Song offers freewheeling funtimes built equally of hardcore and shoegaze, though both in a very ungeneric way; while Habituation To Life deviates into lo-fi country fuzz. Area polymath Alice Low recorded it and the tracklisting etc is all handwritten.
The new four-song EP by Dan Bettridge, singer-songwriter from Ogmore, is also available on cassette – with a pencil for winding the tape included – or very limited (and expensive) 10” vinyl, although if you can’t wait for analogue formats you can just stream it now. Good People. Bad Habits. finds Bettridge locked into that imitation-mahogany soulman croon, but with a blowsy, synthesized modern-AOR backing and a few spots of squeaky Autotune, before Who Am I?, the EP’s final song, pivots into a winsome country-pop ballad. Bettridge sounds like he really wants to be a pop star, and I haven’t the foggiest how plausible that is, but if it happens anyone who dropped £30 on the vinyl will be quids in.
The trend for titles featuring full stops where none are needed continues with Cardiff hip-hop MC Deyah’s new four-tracker THAT WorLD. tapes. – I usually refuse to allow upper/lower case tomfoolery in Buzz as editorial policy, but sometimes make an exception if I really like the artist, as in this case. Deyah is following up Care City, a large and intense album which won last year’s Welsh Music Prize, but the compact package suits her ratatat rhymes and brisk, tricky beats pretty well. Equally, there’s a singsongy cadence to her delivery, and a dreamy way with melody that’s like ambient boom-bap. A certified massive talent!
Here’s a pretty cool turn towards the dark. I’ve written about Matthew Strangis’ unorthodox drum’n’bass productions as Kyam on occasion before, as recently as May in fact, but his debut album as Doubtsower, Asphyxiation Of A Seasick Soul, features five fairly long songs I’d classify as funeral doom. Clean instrumental passages might equally derive from Mogwai-ish post-rock, but his vocals are in a demonically low register, the riffs are thick and molten and there’s swathes of spooky organ. Mucky and lo-fi but in a good way, it was mastered by doom doyen Greg Chandler of Esoteric – and Strangis has apparently compounded this by ALSO joining Panthiest on bass.
Che Ahmed aka Earl Jeffers has variously turned his hand to hip-hop, house, deeper house and broken beat-y type stuff over some 15 years as a producer, including as half of Darkhouse Family. Here we find a 12”, Higher, released on his own label Melange and released mere days ago after a month or two’s delay. It’s crisp dancefloor fare with a jazzy swing and an instrumental contribution from broken beat fave Kaidi Tatham on lead cut The Essence; following that, there are two versions of Higher, smooth-but-not-too-smooth vocal house with dusty-keyed organ manipulation.
Solo synthpop shouter Mantaraybryn seems to identify more readily as Welsh or Cornish depending on who he’s talking to – as do I. And that’s very interesting! New three-song EP Year Of The Heron is, I believe, his first full release as a Cardiff resident, and it leans fulsomely into his bombastic pop mindset with melancholy electro thumpers and the sort of ostensibly-polished-subtly-dishevelled vibe that has allowed Florence & The Machine to endure.
When Man Without Country rocked up on ‘the scene’ some years back, it was as a band-format project, but at this point is a solo vehicle for its founder member Ryan James. Accordingly, the sound has moved further away from indie/shoegaze leanings and sits unequivocally in an electronic pop realm. Bloods, Side A is a five-song EP (seven including two radio edits) that reaches near-synthwave levels of 80s flash on Savannah and threatens to explode into a power ballad for the duration of Ultra-Nightmare.
Now here’s a very different breed of swelling synthesizer shenanigans, and I for one am rapt! Mari Lwyd is a solo artist from the proverbial ‘parts unknown’ in Wales and they make dungeon synth influenced by black metal, old video game soundtracks and Welsh history. Y Ddraig Goch came out via Bandcamp in 2018 but has just been released by Gondolin, a Danish tape label, so I’m using that as an excuse to review it. Its melodies are crystal-clean and frequently folk-inflected, some passages beatless and eerily ambient while others are bolstered by digi-drum crashes. You might find it all too chintzy or kitsch, but I’m confident that Mari Lwyd composes with the utmost sincerity; a followup album, 2019’s Future King, nails the sound still more profoundly.
To the “Black Attic” in Pembrokeshire, where most of the debut album by Martwi was supposedly recorded. Dangoswch Eich Darnau Gwyn i Mi (Inferna Profundus) features the guy behind Wales’ most kvlt and lo-fi black metal project, Revenant Marquis, plus personnel from the part-Welsh Capel Beulah – it’s possible this is actually the same person; I’ll find out the truth if it kills me! – and Vermisst, who are Polish. The eight tracks are swirling, creepy and while certainly black metal in an aesthetic sense, have a clear taste for droney ambience that links back to the 80s industrial and/or 90s spacerock scenes.
Wales Millennium Centre-affiliated label Tŷ Cerdd continue their creditable introduction with a solo piano set performed by BBC NOW’s Christopher Williams, and composed by Mervyn Roberts. The latter, who died in 1990 aged 84, is a significant cog in Welsh classical music history, yet also undersung, certainly in Tŷ Cerdd’s view. Summer’s Day comprises 19 pieces, many slender things of between one and three minutes, and exhibits a certain playfulness – dashing abruptly up and down the piano’s register – amidst moments of instrumental sang-froid. It’s all rather (big or small R) romantic, early 20th century in style perhaps though, I think, mostly composed in the 1940s and 50s. It’s also being published in sheet music form, with a view to other pianists performing it in future.
No Thee No Ess, a two-piece from Cardiff, have an album incoming, but it’s too far away to review yet so here’s Chorus, its first single. I’d previously had them pegged as a sort of countrified rock-gone-psychedelic affair – like, I’unno, Grandaddy or someone? – but this song, which also features producer Frank Naughton on unspecified instruments, is fairly distinct from that. Rattling organ-driven Krautrock with big whooshy riffs, it ends up not a vast stretch from Thee Oh Sees, whose name is an anagram of theirs if you replace some letters with others.
Another offshoot of the small musical community featuring Boy Azooga and bands like them has emerged: Sam Barnes, Boy Azooga’s bassist, flying solo here for his second single Daydream Driver (Rose Parade). Afforded a wilfully fuzzy home recording, it’s a twinkly AOR/country/indie slowburner – a bit like I half-recall No Thee No Ess sounding, in fact – and has a really agreeable way of lurching into its chorus that reminds me of a Morris Minor trying to climb a hill.
Here’s the latest release by Cardiff-based maker of uncompromising noise music Slow Murder, aka Jo Sheehy. It’s a split tape with a likeminded American, Straight Panic – both artists proclaiming to offer a queer take on the, often highly macho, noise and power electronics genres. Sheehy submits four tracks, three replete with heavy, screeching electronic tones and the grandly titled closer A Chance to Die Quickly: An Opportunity To Slowly Birth Anew being a slightly more restrained if no less abstract low end rumble. Straight Panic is pretty cool too, undulating feedback with samples of grumpy weirdos placed over the top.
Finally this month is the third release by XL Life, with the next one (an EP) set to be on the Venn label it says here. Noise is just over two minutes of modern herbertism whose lyrics speak of alienation but whose music seems primed for churning crowds to get, if not actively aggy, at least very interactive. Featuring Traxx, ex of Astroid Boys, on vocals, it’s variously evocative of 80s Oi!, 90s rap metal and 00s grime, and it has a neat video starring a dancer named Tayluh Smith.
words NOEL GARDNER
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