Go on then, have 5 more Welsh albums to get your teeth into
This list just keeps asking for more.
It’s been playing on my mind. So many great Welsh albums, and earlier this week I picked five more that I wanted to highlight as some of my favourites, to add to the 5 before. But… y’know… how could I only pick 10? 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.
Gruff Rhys, American Interior, (2014, Turnstile)
It’s the framework provided by telling the life of Rhys’ ancestor, John Evans, that really makes this album reach the heights that it does. It gives Rhys a rare focus, and it pays off. Evans was “an orphaned farm hand… [who] left Wales for Baltimore in 1972 and walked alone with $1.75 to his name into the wilderness of the Allegheny mountains… in search of a lost tribe of Welsh-speaking Native American, believed by some to be the descendants of Prince Madog…” If that sounds like the sort of typically whimsical subject matter that you might expect to find informing a Gruff Rhys concept album then, well, fair enough, but there is a seriousness behind this record that should not be disregarded. In American Interior, Rhys translates his Welsh mountain loneliness to 17th Century mid-America and the results, perhaps most especially as the album draws to a close – and on ‘Walk into the Wilderness’ in particular – are stunning. American Interior was largely recorded in Bright Eyes producer Mike Moggis’ studio in Omaha, Nebraska, and the record has an accordingly alt-America feel to it. But it is also a record that recalls the classic early Super Furry Animals of Fuzzy Logic and Radiator. There surely haven’t been this many classic guitar sounds on a Gruff-led album since 1997. Is the solo on the title track his most straightforward and best, in fact, since ‘Hometown Unicorn’ in 1996? Do the beatific pedal steel-scapes on ‘Tiger’s Tale’ consciously echo Radiator‘s classic ‘Mountain People’? There are also hosts of great pop songs here, like the Love-esque ‘The Whether (Or Not)’ and the Neon Neon-like ‘Lost Tribes’, all of which goes to make this album, which is concerned at heart with forgotten languages, races and customs, one of Rhys’ most commercially accessible records to date. A subversive achievement indeed.
Skindred, Roots Rock Riot, (2007, Bieler Bros)
Perhaps a little too mainstream for some tastes, and arguably without the gangrenous bite of Babylon (2002) or Union Black (2011), it is in fact Roots Rock Riot that displays the titanic features of Skindred at their best. It has all the grizzled rage you’d expect from one of the world’s favourite bands of the heavy rock circuit of their era, all the primal Gods of Olympus stagecraft, but it also has an enormous helping of melodious ideas and turns of riff that wouldn’t go amiss on a pop album. Okay, so accessibility isn’t necessarily a stamp of approval many bands like Skindred are after, but it’s not how easy on the ear this album might be to the masses that’s the point here. The thing that shines on Roots Rock Riot is the meeting point of the band’s influences, and particularly the influences on front-and-centreman Benji Webbe — rock, ska, reggae, grunge. The tension between these forms opens up chasms, and Webbe’s presence, backed by the granite riffs of guitarist “Mikeydemus” Fry, the pulsating bass of Dan Pugsley, and the heavy sweating drums of Arya Goggin. The opening title track is a tour de force, a gripping salvo that sets up some of the glittering intensity that follows. “Trouble” is perhaps a perfect example of the feel of the album — a hard central riff, but flittered over with a dextrous vocal performance from Webbe, and a hook that will make as many want to swing hips as much as mosh. The single “Ratrace” is a totemic statement on the very idea of Skindred. Great art is about ideas, how interesting they are and how arrestingly they are presented; but also how conflicting ones are related, juxtaposed, and what that means to the expressed whole. Roots Rock Riot is an exhausting display of bristling, blooming ideas. As for Webbe, a talent like Wales has never seen before, and perhaps might never see again, this album is his magnum opus. He is a great songwriter, great lyricist, but with it a massive performer of massive moments. And all those things are here. If it feels a little over-produced at times, a little angled toward the American market who by the mid-noughties were lying their rock extremely clean and radio-friendly, it only now gives the music an admirable clarity, a clear vision. Roots Rock Riot is a huge, audacious manifesto of music and philosophy and where the two crossover. It exists in the fault lines of a thousand ideas and influences, and no matter how many times you listen to it, there will never be a dull moment.
Irma Vep, Embarrassed Landscape, (2020, Gringo Records)
If the Velvet Underground don’t qualify for this list for being only 1/5 Welsh at best, then Irma Vep’s Embarrassed Landscapes provides the next best thing. John Cale’s old band runs its influence through the gritted teeth and distorted, discordant, refulgent rage of this record like water finding the path of least resistance. But Embarrassed Landscape does what all great albums do that are indebted to iconic forefathers, and it makes something fresh and new whilst holding the familiar aloft like some kind of sacrificial offering to the gods of rock n roll. That’s right, if, as Lou Reed had it, life can be saved by rock n roll, then there is some stuff going on in here that isn’t just life-saving, it’s life-affirming, it’s resurrectional. Irma Vep is Edwin Stevens (and not Maggie Cheung) and Embarrassed Landscapes was recorded, it seems, in a heady state of upheaval and musical nomadacy, moving between makeshift spaces in Glasgow and Llanfairfechan. It seems to have been a ramshackle recording experience, although not a process alien to Stevens. Embarrassed Landscapesis an album that smacks of placelessness, of snatched opportunities, and of a rageful, yearning spirit. There are no bigger opening statements of intent on this list than “King Kong”, a 10-minute alt-rock fugue of feedback, off-tune strings, and a Cry Baby pedal that gets right up into your spinal fluid. But Stevens is also a consummate, original, soulful songwriter. “Disaster” is beautifully sad, and “I Do What I Want” sits quite comfortably with any of the best indy pop singles of the last thirty years. A loving relationship with Embarrassed Landscapes will have you moving from George Harrison to The Monks to Pulp to My Bloody Valentine without ever really feeling you’ve left the caustic, longing vicinity of Irma Vep’s dank but welcoming 1980s monochrome bedsit. It’s an album of consistent conceptual energy, of energising riffs and lyrical turns. Stevens is a life-saver.
John Cale, Paris 1919, (1973, Reprise Records)
Musically this might well be Cale’s most accessible achievement. With ‘Macbeth’ being a perfect glam rock stomper and ‘Graham Greene’ almost reaching a reggae skank. A long way from the avant-rock of La Monte Young or even the Velvet’s first album. But, let us not forget that Lou Reed had recently become the dark knight of glam rock due to a friendship forged with an alien rock messiah called Ziggy Stardust, who had been, in turn, heavily influenced by the Reed/Cale line up of the Velvets. The music on this album diversifies so effortlessly between classical, rock, avant-garde and pop that it could be argued that its influence has been felt as equally as any Velvets record, in that it frees the artist to express himself in any way they see fit or can accomplish. But, also, it takes that journey completely seriously and has been copied over the years by much more monetarily successful and completely humourless pop stars. Cale’s album is brimming with humour and intellectualism being aware of one another, with neither being the exclusive drive of the artist. Paris 1919could be the greatest Welsh rock album ever made because it lives and breathes Wales. Like the Welsh people, it is passionate about all culture, grandiose, sometimes frustrating but always sincere, intellectual and proud but self-aware and full of humour, brave and determined to travel and explore, a pilgrim of our green and pleasant lands. It should be taught in schools. It should be everywhere. What is that look on the man’s face on the album cover? It’s a welcoming face, inviting us to take the journey of lifetimes.
Applied Science, We and the Devil, (2021, Mean Business Records)
The Newport hip hop duo comprising of DJ Alkemy and MC Pun-Ra created in 2017 released Wales’s greatest rap album, a bluesy, rock-filled, hard, funny, tripping, crude, soulful journey through the Welsh industrial working class experience. In places, it’s like two smart-mouth kids from a council estate have crashed a Muddy Waters gig. In others it’s like G-Love if G-Love had been from an iron-and-steel city of fist fights and dole queues rather than a beach hut shaded by palm trees. We and the Devil is a remarkable record on many levels, not least for its unrelenting quality of sampling, and what the boys do with those samples. “Get Up” rattles around like you’re getting caught in some crossfire; “Blind Drunk” sounds like they had John Lee Hooker in on the session; “Brash” loops the bass like a wrecking ball going at the theme tune of a 70s cop show; “Looney Tunes” has too much fun with cartoon sound effects than they should be able to get away with; “Holy Moses” sounds like Hank Mobley playing a New Orleans funeral parade; “Brutal Psyche” mixes heavy percussion with Colin Stetson-esque sax riffs. There is, to put it simply, not a moment of We and the Devil that doesn’t dazzle, enthral, and lift the spirit. Lyrically, Alkemy and Pun-Ra don’t mess about. They spit and splutter about the low living of the south Walian working class, but as it should be with great artists, they lift that up into something more important, more sublime, than a simple gripe or a moan at the bar. This is an album of hilariously coarse self-reflection, but also of astute social observation — observation from the inside out. These guys are the real deal — “authentic”, if that label does it for you; but what matters is there is not a second of this long, sprawling album that doesn’t feel real, true, and vital. If you want to know what it’s like to live in these places, this is the album that will let you in — musically and lyrically.
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.