music welsh releases


The most inspired songwriter to have appeared in Wales since at least pre-plague times, Alice Low consolidates close on two years of single releases with Transatlantic Sugar (Clwb Music). Its six songs bristle with, in the words of her Show Business number, “so many ideas” and a


grandiosity. Low’s music bears dishevelled


for her music, folk and electronica is frequently combined, but taking a bombastic, almost theatrical approach rather than the common low-key alternative. Crunching trance synths undergird well- crafted vocal layering, with Aria going all-out on a ‘promo-only 12” Enya remix from 1996’ tip – there’s an accessible nature to the essence of most songs here, but Lloyd as producer deviates from that starting point dramatically.


comparison to the oddest fringes of the early 70s singer-songwriter explosion, with country twang and theatrical flourishes, and moving into the 21st century I hear Bobby Conn and Circuit Des Yeux – but if you’ve heard the component parts before, you may be wowed by how singular these songs sound, and how golden their composer’s production touch is.


Back in 2019 I sent Asidhara money for their debut tape which I didn’t receive, and which none were manufactured as far as I can make out… but I’m not bitter, and to prove it here’s a review of Adleisiau Yr Henuriaid, an actually existing


Damek, I believe, started life as a one-man studio doohickey in the ancient late-2010s era and has since become a three-piece. It comprises people from various Cardiffian heavy bands who trod the boards a decade or so back – Zonderhoof,


mentioned in a slightly puzzled way how this band keep reminding me of Idlewild in a previous review, and shall need to reprise that here.


Fair to say that black metal plus nationalism tends to equal wrong’un central, but Iselder seems sound – making a point of stating his music isn’t for racists – and his latest album Cynefin (UKEM) is decent gear too. Generally favouring a slow-to-mid tempo approach with programmed drums not unlike early Godflesh, and a vocal style where you can make out his lyrics, the blackness comes through in the cold guitar tone, with a dreamy washed- out quality sometimes apparent.


Following on from The Mudd Club’s appearance here last month, on a four-band compilation 7”, here they are again with Give Me A Thrill, their second album. It actually came out late last year on CD but is being pressed to vinyl by Raving Pop


Thorun, Hogslayer – and, on the strength of this self-titled six-song mini-album, sticks firmly with the zeal for big riffs that are often slow and sometimes a bit faster. The vibe is notably more trad/proto doom metal than those bands, though, maybe the interzone between Pentagram and Goatsnake: those are big names to throw around if this kinda thing is your kinda thing, but Damek do it justice, and are done justice by the recording too.


cassette by this Cardiff metallic hardcore powerhouse. Released via Nuclear Family, it’s got two songs on it, both well up there with their debut EP Killing Rites, from 2020. Conditioned To Suffer has a crossover thrash tone to its guitars and an almost Viking metal pomp at certain points; March Of The Bastard Reich also features on The Coming Strife, a compilation of UK hardcore bands, and is faster and rawer than its counterpart, with a quality speed metal guitar solo.


Metamorphosis, the debut album by Bethan Lloyd, is released via Berlin label Soulpunx; Lloyd has lived there recently, I believe, but is of north Walian extraction, with


Death Knell’s Steel String Thing is a London string thing, but Noel Anderson, the main brain behind it, will always be from Porthcawl, where he started making anarcho punk in his mid-2000s-era mid-teens. Much water, and other


Caught Cardiff three-piece Penny Rich a little under a year ago, with no prior knowledge of them or what sort of music they played, and enjoyed their punky grunge shenanigans. This album, a self- released affair titled If Everyone’s An Expert…, is better again, with a


tasty ‘early Sub Pop Records’ vibe cutting through via, especially, the guitar style of frontman Anthony Bee. Their arrangements make for some good examples of tension- and-release rock, and there’s some touches of 80s goth, 90s dirge and – on Spirals, whose lyrics outline the demons of overthinking and self-doubt – post-rocky spoken word. A worthy companion to the stylistically comparable Only Fools And Corpses mini-album I reviewed in this column last month.


Blast!, a label from Bristol. Indeed the band sometimes list themselves as coming from Bristol, other times from Machynlleth, although sister/ brother founder members Sadie and Julian moved to the UK from Kansas. Also Sadie’s Facebook page lists her as being from New Orleans. Bloody hell. Their music is sassy and effervescent garage/ beat rattlers, recorded with an expert lack of finesse, which fans of Thee Headcoatees, Demolition Doll Rods and suchlike will likely enjoy.


things, has flowed under the bridge since then, and for now debut DKSST album Set West, Raising Hell (Crocodile Laboratories) is the culmination: 10 songs of ramshackle shuffling between folk, glam and psychedelia modes. Sometimes I think Robyn Hitchcock, then John Cale or H Hawkline or Guided By Voices, but these are pointers at most, with Anderson making a strong fist of finding his own voice here. He’s assisted by a band of pals including Amy Studt, who you may recall from a brief tilt at teenpop stardom 20 years ago.


some of these eight songs claiming to have been written


Anglesey burial chamber and had their videos filmed in Ynys Mon. As


34 inside an


Iselder is a one-man black metal project from somewhere in Wales, with the one man, Gofid, singing of historical topics such as the Welsh Not, the blue books of 1847 and the Meibion Glyndwr cottage burnings.


Nightmares have made a decent name for themselves since debuting in 2019, with debut album Séance released by a transatlantic combo of Venn and Equal Vision. My initial reference point for them, as it were, was


Newport four-piece The


other band Disjoy, but if they and The Nightmares share a certain


bassist Ben Mainwaring’s


Easy-going countrified folk-rock with ample dual harmonising is the order of the day from Lowri Evans and Sarah Zyborska, aka Tapestri. Plenty of the 10 songs on Tell Me World, their debut album, have a classic-into-modern Nashville production aesthetic, with pedal


steel deployed to wistful effect; others, like Come Alive, are a little folkier and almost ethereal, in the manner of the Sundays or the Cranberries. I find myself curious about who or what is having cold water poured on their rash statements in Crazy, Crazy Times: this present era is no such thing, frown Tapestri, concluding “stop saying that they are”.


NOEL GARDNER


Scan for more music reviews:


gothic aesthetic, it manifests in fairly different ways. Séance is slickly


alt-pop with lots of keyboards, equally reminiscent of music from The Breakfast Club soundtrack, musical theatre emo a la My Chem and the narrow window of post-Be Here Now, pre-Strokes UK indie. I


produced, sensitive-boy


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36  |  Page 37  |  Page 38  |  Page 39  |  Page 40  |  Page 41  |  Page 42  |  Page 43  |  Page 44  |  Page 45  |  Page 46  |  Page 47  |  Page 48  |  Page 49  |  Page 50  |  Page 51  |  Page 52  |  Page 53  |  Page 54  |  Page 55  |  Page 56  |  Page 57  |  Page 58  |  Page 59  |  Page 60  |  Page 61  |  Page 62  |  Page 63  |  Page 64