5 more Welsh albums to get your teeth into

I couldn't just pick 5, obviously.

It’s been playing on my mind. So many great Welsh albums, and earlier this week I picked five that I wanted to highlight as some of my favourites. How could I only pick 5? So, here’s 5 more.

A few years ago, Wales Arts Review ran a series of features counting down our writers’ 100 greatest Welsh albums of all time. Huw Stephens’ new book, Wales: 100 Records, has inspired me to go back to our list and pick out a few of my favourites.

Important note, the mini-essays are not all written by me. The WAR list was a team effort.

With special thanks to the contributors who provided their words and nominations to make the 100 Greatest Welsh Albums of All Time series possible: Cath Holland, Tilly Foulkes, Caragh Medlicott, John Lavin, Gray Taylor, Nerys Williams, Craig Austin, Jude Rogers, Jack Boyce, Gareth Smith, Tomos Williams, and Gary Raymond.

Neon Neon, Stainless Style, (2008, Lex Records)

Introducing John DeLorean. He’s a smooth-talking, 80s yuppie and possibly the world’s first playboy engineer – founder of the DeLorean Motor Company (and hence creator of Doc and Marty’s infamous time machine)… he’s also from the future. No, the John DeLorean caricature conjured here might not really exist. At least not outside of the confines of Gruff Rhys and LA hip-hop darling Boom Bip’s head-spinning concept album, Stainless Style.

The term “genre-defying” has been bandied about a lot by music critics for the last twenty years and more, but – truly – Stainless Style takes the biscuit. A wild joy ride which mixes in the sights and smells of fluorescent 80s luxe living, this record is – in the broadest sense – an electro-pop galivant through many real instances of John DeLorean’s partying and philandering. Sonically it soars through shades of hip-hop, disco, Italo-pop and electro. With look-ins from a wide variety of musical greats (from Cate Le Bon to The Strokes), this album is a heady, silly and masterfully crafted dive into a nostalgia-tinged past with an ear to the future. By its final track, you may just feel – as this critic does – that sonic cohesion is, all in all, pretty overrated.

Silent Forum, Everything Solved at Once, (2019, Libertino)

It’s difficult to think of a more musically literate album to have come out of Wales in recent years than Silent Forum’s debut. The band seem just as versed in new romantic tension as they are in noughties indy vernacular established by bands like the Klaxons and the Rapture. They have a live looseness on this album. It was a brave and correct decision to not reign them in in the studio. The magic of Everything Solved at Once can be found in the winding jammed out grooves of “How We Faked the Moon Landings” and ‘Kind of Blue”.

Frontman Richard Wiggins is a classic of the type, and has all the balls-out arthouse confidence that aligns him with some of the greats like David Byrne and Steve Strange. On stage, he commands the space, and he does the same in the sonic realm of the album. He is an arresting, dominating presence, and the music, cool, clever, mysterious and ice blue chic, washes around him. There is a freeform feel to the band at times, like they’re in danger of going off and on and on. But it’s not a danger, it’s a thrill. Songs like “Credit to Mark Sinker” are more like Robert Wyatt bouncing off 80s Miles Davis. The exquisite euphoria of the album is in the fact you’re never quite sure if the band is going to hold on to its feverous ride. And all the time Wiggins is in the middle like some kind of shaman. Everything Solved at Once closes with the sublime “A Pop Act”, a song so good, and so excellently performed, it would sit easily with the best things the Cure or the Cult or Simple Minds ever did.

Man, 2oz of Plastic with a Hole in the Middle, (1969, Sanctuary)

The great psychedelic prog rock statement to come from Wales was from the first incarnation of Swansea icons, Man. It begins with the melodic sweeps and crashing cymbals and chanting and seagull noises familiar to all students of prog with the full twelve minutes of “Prelude/The Storm”, a Floydian glide through analogue soundscapes and “out there” atmospherics; and it ends with the rollicking riff of “Brother Arnold’s Red and White Striped Tent”.

Guitarists Deke Leonard and Micky Jones are holding nothing back here, and it’s a remarkably confident album of studio trickery for a band still in their earliest stages of development. Pye Records made the strange decision to assign them John Schroeder as producer, previously an Ivor Novello Award-winning writer of easy listening songs. You can hear some of that softness in the third movement of “Prelude/The Storm” and some of the surprising turns on the record are down to the incongruity of raggedy-arse rock players from Swansea and Schroeder.

ut the hippy-dippy nonsense is shredded almost as soon as it establishes itself. “It Is As It Must Be” hears the band more like the blues rock live outfit they would go on to remain for decades to come on the festival circuit. There are flashes of Cream, The Doors, but most notably, on tracks like “Spunk Box” and “It Is As It Must Be” they are doing a great impression of Black Sabbath two years before Black Sabbath’s debut album came out. It may be dated in parts, but 2 Oz. still rocks, and still rolls. One of the great rock albums of the earliest years of great rock albums.

Audiobooks, Astro Tough, (2021, Heavenly Recordings)

This audacious follow up to 2018’s Now! (in a minute) showcases a sharper vision from super producer and multi instrumentalist David Wrench and his partner in crime artist and model (and now definitely writer) Evangeline Ling. Ling’s deadpan delivery of her caustic, empathetic, often hilarious lyrics are now front and centre rather than part of the jagged experimental landscapes of Wrench’s world. This alone makes for a step in the right direction from their brilliant-enough debut.

Astro Tough never misses a beat, and is frequently as good as thoughtful, soulful, dance music can get. It’s a paean to club culture for the most part, but also there are sweeping moments of acoustic psychedelia and even a bit of 80s naval-gazing indy-pop in there. Ling now brings to mind such unshakably radical vocalists as Ari Up, Sarah Nixey, and Sue Tompkins, and her story-telling is now as assured and incisive as an Amy Hempel or a Claire-Louise Bennett. Wrench gives bedding to these winding parades through the anxieties, disappointments and idiosyncrasies of the modern life of a young woman such thudding, melodic, backbeats the juxtaposition of music and lyric is sometimes unbearably poignant, unbearably arresting, and unbearably cool. This is an album that will surely grow in stature as its treasures are more widely discovered. And it deserves to be heavily weighed down with awards and accolades in the next year or so.

Cate Le Bon, Mug Museum, (2013, Amplify Music)

I think most of us have that one drawer in our home. The place where the old nic-nacs, broken pens and train tickets collect to form a mishmash of relics from times passed. For Cate Le Bon, her equivalent of this capsule is a collection of mugs which – over time – began to take on a greater emotional resonance. Written after the death of her maternal grandmother and a relocation to LA, Mug Museum proves Le Bon’s dedication to defying expectation.

Far from macabre or sad – and with a twee, hiccupy edge about as non-LA as you can get – Mug Museum is a warm, beautiful record which mixes quirky lyrical reflections with off-kilter sixties guitar and joyous toots of horn, all set against an atmospheric background organ. Le Bon is a master of micro-moments, zooming into unlikely nooks and crannies to find the most intricate and unusual of patterns – ones usually invisible to the naked eye. From the rustic frenetic retro of opener ‘I Can’t Help You’ to the creaking piano stall of the sparse and eponymous closing track ‘Mug Museum’, Le Bon proves that the weird and the quirky – even when dressed in more accessible garb – can be as sincere and tender as anything played straight. As Le Bon sings at the close: ‘I forget the detail / But remember the warmth.’

60ft Dolls, The Big 3, (1996, Sony Music)

The influences on the song writing of the 60ft Dolls is writ large on this album – from The Jam to Thin Lizzy – that it’s almost like a testament to what Britpop might have been had it not been so smug. The Dolls always sat uneasily in the company of that label, even though the two hit singles from The Big 3, “Stay” and “Happy Shopper”, are as good as anything coming out from that stable at the time. “Stay” is a gliding lesson in guitar pop with a golden hook and the integrity of the greatest exponents of that tradition, and “Happy Shopper” is a raucous assault with a binding riff that shouldn’t work but does.

The sub-label they themselves acquired from reviewers, like “grunge-mod” and “proto-pop metal blues” prove just how hard it is to actually pin down what it is the Dolls were. The result of a confluence of influences, yes, but still emerging very much as their own unassailable sound. The Big 3 has across its grooves without a doubt one of the finest guitar sounds you’ll find anywhere on any album, and songwriter and guitarist Richard Parfitt proves himself a singular rock vocalist as well as a sonic perfectionist. It’s up there with Lou Reed’s Ecstasy, although Reed had spent decades looking for the perfect sound. Kevin Sheilds had been on a similar journey that reached mythic odyssey status by the time he produced Loveless.

But Parfitt’s accomplishments seem more pure, more primal, as if he discovered it by splitting a boulder on some sacred mountain. The Big 3 is a compelling argument that the Dolls remain undervalued, and that they are probably the greatest rock band ever to come out of Wales, forged in the snakebite and black flecked night streets of post industrial Newport in the early 90s. Parfitt is an intense, wiry, electrifying frontman, but this album also gets the best of bassist and co-songwriter Mike Cole, a wild and unpredictable presence next to Parfitt’s taught Weller-esque reserve. The record also makes a strong case for Carl Bevan as the finest rock drummer of that era, and tracks like “No1 Pure Alcohol” and “Pig Valentine” bely an energetic craftsman amidst all that balls out rock n roll. The Big 3 is an album of high energy, high intensity, and it’s laden with great rock songs. A taster of their fearsome reputation as a live outfit, it’s one of the greatest guitar albums ever recorded.

Gary Raymond is a novelist, author, playwright, critic, and broadcaster. In 2012, he co-founded Wales Arts Review, was its editor for ten years. His latest book, Abandon All Hope: A Personal Journey Through the History of Welsh Literature is out now with Calon Books.