RECENT WELSH MUSIC YOU MAY HAVE MISSED | REVIEW
Is this thing on? Anyone out there? Do they still make that stuff, what was it called, “music”? Yes, very clearly they do! The releases I’ve plucked out this month, both recent and Welsh, are just a portion of what caught my ear… but, notwithstanding new releases coming down the pipe, I’ve basically no idea what lots of bands have been doing for the last 13 months, or if they even exist in some cases. It’s a bit strange.
Conversely, you’ve also got Broken Fires, a Swansea band whose single Dreamer (on the painfully named label Phwoar And Peace) is their first for five years. It’s very American-sounding college rock with harmonies, high-pitched rattling keyboard parts and a Weezer-type solo. “I want something I can tell the kids / In 45 years,” goes the refrain, leaving me wondering whether the singer envisages becoming a father late in life or relaying anecdotes to his adult-age children.
Freyja Elsy [pictured, top] lives in Cardiff and plays in indieish band Blue Amber (reviewed in March’s edition of this column) among other pursuits; Lungs is her debut solo single and in under five minutes incorporates swelling grandiosity and intensely lo-fi intimacy. Spoken word parts, supposedly recorded into a Voicenote phone app and outlining some sort of bad relationship dealie, intersperse low-lit electronic pop with lyrics about the same, opening out into a whomping coda of strings and big drums.
Benjamin Mason, from Sir Benfro in Pembrokeshire, has been sending Buzz his music now and then for a few years. His latest incarnation is 50% of Gabe Is a Unit [pictured, below] who also feature Ben Wilson and no evident Gabes. Their self-titled debut EP is a pleasantly surprising departure, featuring heavy/stoner-ish riffs and a triumphalist vibe – notably on track three, whose lyrics are taken from Thomas Love Peacock’s poem The War Song Of Dinas Vawr. Following that, though, is I’ve Had An Absolutely Marvellous Evening Babes, which reverts to creepy synthpop and is narrated in the persona of a posh drunk at the end of a dinner party.
When I started work at Buzz, in two thousand and actually let’s move on, I was introduced to the astonishing character HRH Ivor Beynon Lord Of Steel: a Blaenau metal obsessive who performed live to backing tracks in backwoods pubs aplenty and would later audition on TV in an early round of X-Factor. A sample of Simon Cowell dismissing him features on Those Who Offend Beware, Ivor’s first album for several years, among a laundry list of audacious song topics and a haunted forest of classic metal guitar pyro. (The Bandcamp link above includes four songs about 19th century Chartist heroes, which aren’t on the version I was sent for some reason.) A bonus CD, Ivor Party 2021, features a Judas Priest-heavy selection of rock and metal classics belted out karaoke-style. Ivor Beynon is nothing short of a Welsh hero of outsider music – respect!
More twinkly synths and breakuppy lyrics courtesy of Pontypridd’s Hvnter, whose new single Drink To Forget was – he says – a crowd favourite when performed live in early 2020. I can imagine it working well at decent volume in front of a moderately boisterous crowd, its sadboi emo vox bolstered by a few stirring key changes and a chunky beats-and-bass frame that’s a bit tropical house, a bit garage.
Through The Eyelet is the first new music from formerly-Cardiff-now-Radnorshire-based trio Islet for ages. Or so I thought to myself before realising that their last came out in March of last year. My calendar is absolutely up the spout and it’s everyone’s fault but mine! Anyway, this self-released EP contains four remixes of songs from Eyelet, that 2020 LP, by pals and associates of the trio. Mera Bhai, also of Flamingods, douses Radel 10 in wonky acid; MounQup, a Spain-based French soloist, renders Good Grief a little more broken and eerie, while Gwenno is on a dreamy ambient house tip retooling Geese.
Though talking the talk about her superstar ambitions, Kitty is largely an enigma to me at the time of writing: previously, she appears to have moved from Powys to Paris, and then to Cardiff a couple of months ago. I’m sure she has her reasons. Latest track Heart On Crack is intensely modish, phonescreen-bright digital pop in the Charli XCX mould, all autotuned vocals and lyrical terminology that was almost unknown to the wider pop audience a decade ago (“pressed”, “a flex”, “fuckboys” etc).
Cardiff MC Mace The Great has got a fair bit of attention over the last 12 months, thanks in no small part to releasing new tracks every few weeks, although I’m confident that if people had been able to go out and bug out to this stuff live he’d be way bigger by now. Eight-track EP My Side Of The Bridge is honestly class, best Welsh rap I’ve heard for ages: steel-sharp production exhibits grime and trap influences, numbers like Dis One primed for booming through some low end-heavy club speakers, and Mace’s lyrical style comes with boundless energy and justified self-confidence.
Lucy’s Odyssey, a single by Melin Melyn preceding an EP out in summer, is in certain respects fastidiously textbook Welsh guitar pop: winsome vocals in the vein of H Hawkline or Euros Childs (who has also combined that first name and a possessive apostrophe in a song title), jangly psych guitar with a few bloopy FX. It does however sharply change tack about three-fifths of the way through, with some disarmingly smooth 80s style jazz-pop sax which tarts up their sound in a most agreeable way.
Seen the name Omaloma [pictured, below] kicking about for a while but their four-song EP on the Cae Gwyn label, Roedd, is my first listen of substance to this Conwy duo. It’s polished if retrograde synthpop archness, opening number 400+ (about Edward Colston, apparently) having a bit of the New Orders to its vocal melody but overall closer to the pastel-shaded archness of Destroyer, or from the other end of Wales Private World from Cardiff. Awyr Agored, which closes the release, is my pick on account of its hyper-Balearic slomo vibe. Into this!
Swansea’s Edward Hancock, trading as Only Rainyday Rainbow, emailed Buzz a link to his latest album on New Year’s Eve, and appears to have actually released another EP already, even though said album – The Brain Thunk When It Thailed – just came out. I’ll concentrate on it here, for brevity’s sake. Ostensibly, Hancock makes kind of lo-fi psych, but that grievously undercooks quite how freaky The Brain… sounds: a disorienting chowder of stretched-tape distortion, pitchshifted vocal flotsam and a kernel of Syd Barrett songcraft. Cuts such as Your Nature will surely test the mettle of any DIY rock consumer out there; I’m impressed by the extent to which Only Rainyday Rainbow commits to the madness.
Adam Wilkinson lives in the Pembrokeshire village of Boncath, and without having visited I’d wager there is minimal local call for partway folk-inflected ambient techno/IDM instrumental atmosphere. Yet that is what Wilkinson makes in his production guise as Quiet Noise, and why the international (electronic) music community is such an important hive of communication. Story Machine, the fourth Quiet Noise album and first for five years, is released via respected Sheffield label Audiobulb, and though parts of it feel caught between stools – not quite cinematic, not quite ravey – it contains some lovely chiming melodies and clock-tick beats.
The latest release by Revenant Marquis, Below The Landsker Line (Inferna Profundus), not only flags up this black metal solo act’s Pembrokeshire location, it implies a microscene of like minds in the county, named the Black Circle. It’s still all way too clandestine to make much sense of, but Revenant Marquis reps his ends with a 10-minute opening song, Haverfordwest, which like all his music sounds like it was recorded directly into an Aiwa boombox on a Woolworths cassette retrieved from a garage that’s been locked for 30 years. The logical endpoint for lo-fidelity grimness, I find this guy’s music compelling but if you were mystified as to why someone would want to sound like this I doubt he’d be overly wounded by that.
Following from the above, hence breaking with alphabetical order, this album by The Pessimist Chamber, What Sally Saw, is on a label called Namazu but seems to have ties to Inferna Profundus, and features a duo from Pembrokeshire (“a mysterious British black metal act”) and Norway respectively. Curious! Whoever it is, it’s not metal at all, rather beatless keyboard atmospherica: John Carpenter-inspired, it says here, but strikes me as being way more dankly droney and Berlin School-y. Feeling it either way.
There’s only one Welsh musician I know of who rivals Revenant Marquis for gotta-hand-it-to-them success in the field of anonymity, and that’s White Fawn. Now I acknowledge that relatively few people are invested in knowing who White Fawn is, at the time of writing, but I’ve been trying to figure it out for a few years now since discovering her spectacular avant-folk on Bandcamp. She’s renamed and deleted her streaming sites several times since, but currently trades under her original moniker, has a tiny bit more biog online than before (is an alumnus of Newport Uni’s Creative Sound & Music course) and has just released a mini-album, Tales Of The Night.
Claiming to be themed round dreamstates and out of body experiences, it showcases the musician’s compelling use of near-new age bells and percussion, unclassifiable quasi-dub (Hot Spring Night is as good as anything she’s released), and some highly zonged-out Celtic mistiness. It’s the sort of music which could probably do with some ‘for fans of…’ nudging, to spark interest, and yet I can’t really think of much that sounds like this. If you’re reading this because you got a link to this column and made it to the end, White Fawn rules! If you’re reading because you heard her music and Googled to see if anyone else has reviewed it… hey, thanks for stopping by.
words NOEL GARDNER
