music welsh releases WELSH


RELEASES


releases as part of industrial veterans Attrition might be a clearer pointer to parts of Two (Opa Loka), an album that bisects acoustic ambience and experimental folk and was recorded in south-west Wales, where I believe he lives. The instruments used on these recordings aren’t listed, merely that Arkley played them all, but the Cyclobe-esque ones with droney, harmonium-like


The history of bilingual Welsh rock bands tends to relate that if they choose to pursue one path at any point, it means singing predominantly or exclusively in


single, released via Libertino, by Pontypridd’s Chroma, suggests they’re going in the opposite direction. Fair play! Weithiau is a bit of a departure from how I remember them a few years ago, with a neat fuzzy 90s alt sound (crafted without any guitar, if I’m reading this right) and big lungy vocals about a flatlining relationship courtesy of Katie Hall. Caru. Cyffuriau is more of a revert to type, buzzband garage rock in the style of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs.


English – but this two-song


Times Of Innocence are right up my alley – ditto the ones where something


sounds


medieval is put through a whack of reverb. Its final track, Raven Valley, surpasses the 20-minute mark.


stringed and perhaps such as


Another year, another short review of Cardiff-based electronica project


As Zeuk, his longish-running solo incarnation, Marc Roberts has turned in multiple eccentric mystical folk ditties on CDR – the last, Minutes, was reviewed here just a few months ago. Ghost Of Clone, released on the Folk Archive label as Minutes was, is (I believe) his first release under his given name. This is because it’s a companion piece to a book of poems, also titled Ghost Of Clone, yet conversely is his most collaborative release to date. Six tracks feature readings of poetry – not sure if


“I’m the twink on the TV / Shove it in my face so I know my place.” Can… can he SAY that? You betcha, buddy! “That” being a lyric from Femme, the second album by Lloyd Best aka Cardiff electropop balladeer Dead Method. It builds on both the lyrical and musical content of his debut, 2020’s Queer Genesis, essentially his introduction to the world as an aspiring LGBTQ pop icon. This time, Best gives the impression of being more emotionally extreme in every direction, while the 12 songs – produced by Edward Russell – bounce, stylistically, between the 80s British synthpop top table and Gaga-ish theatre-pop barnstormers. A general sense that these songs are written with a specific community in mind are underlined by the penultimate Community, which appears directed at a single person from it.


the book – by what are termed “hallucinatory voices”, to musical backdrops of ambient guitar wash and experimental cello, the latter provided by frequent Zeuk guest performer Jimmy Ottley. Rather unlike Roberts’ other releases, and a successful experiment.


it’s from


Sendero Luminoso is a solo venture from Owen Griffiths, whose CV includes a few psych- rock type outfits such as Infinity Forms Of Yellow Remember (their Bandcamp page is hosting this release, even) but is now living somewhere rural and rather distant from their Cardiff base. Three tracks


Cardiff


again, reviewed in these monthly columns as recently as last autumn, but under their previous name, Clwb Fuzz. In that that sounds more like a gig promoters’ handle than a band, probably not a bad call, although I keep reading it as ‘middling’, which can’t have been the intention. Fortunately, their first two Mk.2 songs are a bit better than middling. Figurehead is on a psych/ shoegaze tip in terms of its tempo, aesthetic and production


group Midding were,


Here’s a really interesting solo album from a musician associated with the more goth/death-leaning end of the UK doom metal scene.


but there’s some twangy Tex-Mex guitar parts that push things in a vaguely Gun Club direction. Rain Down is a fairly short number that’s throwaway in principle but has a precious


Ian Arkley plays in My Silent Wake and has been on that scene since the late 80s. More recent


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and tousled vocal like one of those semi-acoustic songs you got on most Blur albums.


core, its languid strum values,


Most delighted was I to stumble upon the knowledge that Rod Thomas, drummer of early-00s Carmarthenshire post-hardcore band Jarcrew, is still making music, under the name Skull Honours.


vocal – recorded on an eight-track at home, Sendero Luminoso is less riff-monstrous than Griffiths’ usual mode but certainly still within psychedelic confines. It Is What It Is drones and creaks with a sort of bucolic calm but plenty of shivery unease; Sacred Bones is a bit gnarlier, like a Loop demo meets some super-austere coldwave turn; and It’s So Easy is not a Guns N’ Roses cover but a sleepy strummer that goes nowhere as a song and does so very pleasantly.


– one instrumental, two


Wylderness, a six-piece constructed from parts of other spiky Cardiff bands such as Kutosis and Samoans, release second LP Big Plans For A Blue World about four years after their debut, and again via their own Succulent label. That one seemed to get nailed pretty squarely into the shoegaze pigeonhole, which I don’t think suffices for BPFABW, although it could be described using various similar terminology. Guitars – no less than four of Wylderness are guitarists – get layered, textured and complemented with synth and clarinet. Their influences skew


contemporary-ish fuzzballs like Deerhunter but most flagrantly (and entertainingly) on YLT vs VU, a sort of ‘answer song’ to The Gift by The Velvet Underground in the style of Yo La Tengo.


American, often meaning


Outside Broadcast, whose Earth Calling and Mrs Windsor’s Island albums featured in this column in 2020 and ‘21 respectively. The latest Outside Broadcast album Socialism(described as a sort of self-tribute to their political leanings and “the fight for worldwide social justice”) takes the expansive proggy electronica leanings that were already audible and makes it the prime focus. Over 18 tracks we get plenty of gleaming cinematic- techno synths, effervescent-yet- measured electro-tinged basslines and samples of dialogue from very famous movies such as Blade Runner and 2001. I found the latter element rather offputting – it feels like using a cheat code to achieve profundity – but this musical mode is, on the evidence to date, Outside Broadcast at their strongest.


He had an earlier alias, Touchstone Pictures, that released a tape about a decade ago before vanishing, and indeed Jarcrew have a couple of gigs (and a reissue of their one album) due this year. Skull Honours’ SKHNZ5 is five tracks/almost 40 minutes of cosmic synth gloop, certainly with soothing tendencies but a shade jittery and paranoid too: very ‘early 70s German commune’, or post-millennial updaters of same such as Emeralds. Chilldozer has some very pretty ambient techno melodies and folktronica loops in addition to a commendably bad title.


Released digitally through a Russian label, Calligraphy, the four-track Time is, I think, the debut EP by the Cardiff-based Tom Algorithm, if not his debut release entirely. (He’s been around for a few years as a DJ and promoter, under his given name Tom Ware.) The title track opens: eight minutes of melodic, agreeably lachrymose


techno whose synths sometimes seem to mimic a bowing violin, it’s remixed at the end too by someone named Windom R. Elements is a more percussive tech-houser with a creepy haunted vocal refrain and Jill’d takes bits from the previous two numbers – shuffly drums, sawing melody lines – and throws in a clanging piano break for good measure.


and trance-adjacent


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