The last few weeks I’ve been picking my favourite albums to have come out Wales. Here’s what I plan to be the final 5 from a list of what s now 20.
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.
Deyah, Care City, (2020, High Mileage, Low Life)
In 2020, Deyah became the first black artist to win the Welsh Music Prize, and there could be no finer winner than Care City. Deyah is clear from the start that Care City is not just a collection of tracks; it’s a state of mind. Although hip-hop has a rich history when it comes to concept albums, the idea of an album being a state of mind, a feeling – rather than narrative-driven as with The Roots’ Undun (2011) or Ghostface Killah’s 36 Seasons (2014) – is something that is rare amongst the abundance of other brilliant concept albums.
Care City is about belonging as much as it is about Cardiff or Nigeria. Deyah’s brutally confessional style compels the listener to be invested in her thoughts, emotions and actions. She is a brilliant rapper and she showcases mesmerising flows. Musically too, Deyah has created some intimate spaces. “Planet X” brings more of the spacey atmospherics but this time with added funk to husky vocals, with the strummed guitar adding to the laid-back feel. There is a powerful meeting of music and voice. “Ciao”, the album’s fifth track, is a melancholic reflection on past mistakes. The captivating bassline and drums blend well with the dark lyrical content which covers drug abuse, past relationships and depression.
Closing track “Liquor Lament” is undoubtedly a standout moment in which Deyah discusses her internal conflict regarding her increasingly distant relationship with God. She discusses temptation and sin whilst also questioning whether she’s lost her spirituality – and what she must do to regain it. The honesty here is so vivid, so powerfully expressed, it begins to feel as though Deyah is opposite you in a confessional booth. This is no accident; Care City is a spiritual album deeply concerned with faith and religion, and ‘Liquor Lament’ is its climax. The synth-infused R&B instrumentation blends well with the lyrical content and is the perfect outro to a brilliantly brave and personal album.
Young Marble Giants, Colossal Youth, (1980, Rough Trade)
The album comes out of nowhere; an ambiguous, modest wheeze of synthesised effects, barely registering; and thirty-eight minutes later it fffts and purrs, a nervously prodded organ seems to disassemble before you, and the album’s over, and you’re left wondering what exactly just happened. Nothing sounds like Colossal Youth. It has its kin – I could list many albums that remind me of it – Nico’s The Marble Index (1969), Skip Spence’s Oar (1969)– but these records don’t sound like Colossal Youth, they merely seem to inhabit the same space; most likely an empty dilapidated old picture house with fallen gantry and ripped up ruby-coloured upholstery.
Released by Cardiff trio Young Marble Giants in 1980, Colossal Youthis perhaps the great time (and simultaneously timeless) capsule of the turn of one remarkable decade into the next. What the seventies will be remembered for, musically, is punk, and what the eighties will be remembered for is the electronica of the synthesiser. Where Colossal Youth sits is at this right angle where the three-chord gob of punk and the earnest shoulder swaying of New Romanticism is exactly at its most interesting point. It is a deconstructionist masterpiece, in that it does exactly what Howard Devoto could never really bring himself to do with Magazine, and that is: lay bare.
The music on Colossal Youth would surely have been mistaken for a demo by any other record label execs had YMB not been signed to Rough Trade, where they shared a stable with other creatives who sounded like nobody else (think of The Smiths’ début, Scritti Politti’s ‘Skank Bloc Bologna’ (1978), and Ivor Cutler’s Privilege (1983), and you begin to get an idea of Rough Trade’s philosophy in the early 1980s). That the music sounds so incomplete is only part of the charm. There is much being done in the empty spaces. It is folk music, of course, only the folk of the basement night club with sweat-dripping walls, leather and denim, acne, bubble gum, and monochrome nights where nothing quite goes to plan. Alison Statton’s vocal is pure flat-folk, in the tradition of the fifties’ London coffee dens. There are little inflexion and no passion, and it is captivating, palely sitting atop the intricately assembled songs like a barefoot chanteuse, legs tucked under the bottom, on a Moroccan rug.
And these songs are not composed, not ‘played’ like the Buzzcocks might have recorded them; they are assembled, every inch clicked into place, carefully, but far from delicately. These songs are robust. Anything less sturdy would not have lasted so long, so well. Kurt Cobain took more from the Moxham Brothers’ songs than he ever did from the Sex Pistols, and he readily admitted it.
Scritti Politti, Songs to Remember, (1982, Rough Trade)
They say that good things come to those who wait. A maxim that perfectly encapsulates the deferred release of Scritti’s debut album in the September of 1982 – a point in time that bookends the giddy three-year imperial phase of Britain’s post-punk/new pop revolution. Significantly delayed, for initially personal and latterly artistic reasons, Songs to Rememberremains the album that best represents that unique period in British music history – when the kids who most understood the true spirit of punk swiftly tossed aside its dreary old rulebook and reached out to grasp pop’s glittering prize.
As a former member of the ‘sensible knitwear’ faction of provincial punk’s avant-garde, Green Gartside – a product of a concrete South Wales new town – emerges here as one of the genre’s most fascinating maverick figures and, to this day, the possessor of one of the finest white soul voices that this nation has ever gifted to the world. Within the grooves of this timeless album, his seemingly effortless vocals weave golden strands of unconventional political thinking into a luxuriously inventive fusion of funk, reggae, soul and jazz. At the time, it represented a jolting wake-up call to many of the band’s early followers, and almost certainly to its record company, Rough Trade, who initially struggled to keep up with the new-found ambition underpinning Gartside’s musical reinvention.
Having abandoned the Marxist ideology of the band’s initial manifesto and recordings, the artist instead turns his attention to French philosophy (Jacques Derrida), the writings of Nietzsche (Asylums in Jerusalem) and the self-flagellating introspective funk of Lions After Slumber. It’s a delicious combination that is unapologetic about its shiny new veneer and which acknowledges, as Gartside himself did, that “you don’t have to be lobotomised in order to make pop music”. Most importantly perhaps, Songs to Remember is an album unshackled from any anxieties about the tedious notion of ‘selling out’ – a hippy notion incongruously co-opted by punk’s most narrow of thinkers. It’s a collection of songs that brushes up without dumbing down and which sprinkles glitter upon asphalt.
It also contains an album closer so heartbreakingly perfect that all others must surely bow down before it. The Sweetest Girl, a song supposedly about “the tendency for things to fall apart in the light of political awareness” – remains one of the finest songs of the 1980s, or of any decade. A honey-drenched exercise in eclectic, self-assured pop magnificence and one that continues to beguile audiences almost four decades later. Recent Scritti live shows have seen Gartside open proceedings with the song in a joyous display of getting your big guns out early – a wholly justified act of self-confidence given the deep well of vocal majesty that he can still draw from.
It’s a move almost as self-assured as calling your debut album Songs to Remember – but who would begrudge Gartside that? This is intellectual art pop in excelsis. An exercise in sublime pop futurism and a masterclass in the art of creative renaissance.
Huw Warren, Hundreds of Things a Boy Can Make, (1997, Babel Label)
There is no doubt that Huw Warren is one of the most important and accomplished musicians to come out of Wales in the twentieth century. Thoroughly schooled in modern compositional techniques and ‘difficult’ time signatures yet completely instinctive and of the moment in his improvisation Huw has been involved in numerous important and influential projects and recordings. From his time with folk singer June Tabor which led to the formation of Quercus, to Perfect Houseplants and his album with Welsh singer Lleuwen Steffan, Huw has ploughed his own unique and distinctive furrow. Along with Paula Gardiner, he has been instrumental in putting ‘Welsh jazz’ on the map. As is often the case with ‘best of’ lists, jazz is often forgotten, and any inclusion becomes somewhat tokenistic (like the ‘jazz’ inclusion in the Mercury Prize). So here it is… Hundreds of Things a Boy Can Make is a glorious life-affirming statement from Huw that includes superb contributions from his international core quartet of jazz heavy-weights Mark Feldman on violin, Peter Herbert on bass and Martin France on drums, and others like Mark Lockheart and Dudley Phillips when he augments the core quartet format for a larger ensemble sound. Released in 2004 this album encapsulates Huw’s musical virtuosity, playfulness and quirkiness. From the rollicking “Where the debris…” and “Sheep” to the sheer beauty of “Ravishing Indifference”, this album is of the very highest order.
Goldie Lookin’ Chain, Kings of Caerleon, (2013, 1983 Records)
The best album from Newport’s comedy hip hop outfit (who have now been going for more than twenty years) could have just as easily been titled Kings of Inconvenience, such has been the stick in the maw for a Welsh music scene that often takes itself very seriously. At one time, The Goldie Lookin’ Chain were almost definitely channeling the Beastie Boys with their schtick, but much of their output now brings to mind more of a pythonesque take on urban music, bringing a surreal gutter humour to a musical backdrop that varies in sophistication. But when they are good – which means when their hearts are in it – the group shows themselves to be a sharp-witted, musically very intelligent, and really very good rappers.
It all comes together on Kings of Caerleon, the GLC’s only sustained statement of how great they can be. It’s hilariously funny, but break away from what they’re saying and you still have an excellent record that houses a depth of sound and a structural experimentalism. There is a marriage here of confidence (they were never short of that) and ability, and the result is less manic and a more mature feel to the sound. It’s also arguably the GLC’s finest line up, with some new faces adding some freshness and the original ones hitting their peak. Kings of Caerleon is one of the best musical statements about the life of any city anywhere, and Newport shines through all the backhanded affection.
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.