Art Craft and Leisure news

We got both kinds of music – country and western, the saying goes. But those saying the saying forgot to check out this monthly column of marginal Welsh music, where Noel Gardner describes 10 new releases in ways suggesting they are neither country or western.

Mutant hardcore punks FLUBBER drop gnarly debut EP

South Wales hardcore punk ensemble Flubber played their first gig one year ago this month and released their first physical product, a five-song cassette, the other week. That’s just the right timescale for this sort of thing if you ask me – not too fast or slow, allowing space to Grow and Develop as a band before maximising your reach in the sector. More to the point this tape is hot scat! With heads from The Dogs, Can Kicker and Heartpiece among the quintet, Flubber crank up the vocal reverb and swirly guitar pedals for just over seven minutes of green-hued feedback, ignorant breakdowns and gothic undertones.

Say hello, wave goodbye to outgoing post-rockers FORT

Ben, Craig, Gavin and Matthew, we hardly knew ye! Those are the identities of the four fellows of Fort, who from their Cardiff base have been on their expansive post-rock instrumental thing for the best part of a decade and are signing off by releasing their debut LP, the drolly titled A Token Of Our Depreciation. This band were well-liked among Arctangent Festival attendee types, from what I could tell, so you wonder if, in such an album-based genre, they’d have capitalised on that had they done one earlier. Certainly, on ATOOD they display all the moves – proggy time changes, neoclassically clean melodies, heavy passages bordering on the territory of someone like Neurosis – to leave a certain type of postrocker swooning.

Footwork, but the floor is lava: noise conceptualist FUCK RADIO

Wala is being billed as the debut album by Fuck Radio, a Cardiff-based, Clydach-originated maker of extreme noise music. It follows several cassette releases under this name in the last 12 months or so (most of which, like this one, aren’t streamed anywhere), and I don’t know precisely what makes something an ‘album’ in his taxonomy, but if you can still pick up a copy by the time you read this (try here) I recommend it. If, that is, you like the idea of Chicago footwork – in all its tricksy rhythms/vocal refrains glory – being cut up and processed into a zillion near-unrecognisable, ear-violating shards, as that is Wala’s core concept. Five noise scene compadres help FR out in this quest and you certainly can’t dance to it but you can sort of vibrate on the spot.

Seasoned producer under new alias KAVALCADE launches with fine EP

Cardiff electronicist Tom Wallace has released music under a few names already and is debuting a new one, [Kavalcade], with the four-track Signal EP. It’s released via the Machine label, which has issued previous Wallace music as Pope John Paul Van Damme; not sure if that alias is being fully retired but Kavalcade is certainly, as he puts it, “less convoluted”. Musically, it’s still firmly in complex-patterned IDM territory, though on this release at least less tearout/junglist than PJPVD’s average. The rhythms are springy, and treated to layers of distortion I find aesthetically pleasing, but there’s a certain minor-chord contemplative feel to some of the melodies. Apparently it was created using software developed by Tim Exile, and if you remember Tim Exile you might be in the target audience for this release.

MOCHYN DAER: meditative ambient folk steeped in rural Wales

London-based Joni Lewis records music (and DJs on various internet radio stations) as Mochyn Daer, and Riverloom, her debut album under that name, draws on Welsh heritage more profoundly than anything else in this column or most others. I don’t actually know where in Wales she’s originally from, but this extensive tape – eight songs, 72 minutes – taps into a deep and ancient rurality, all cromlechs and lurking marshland soundpainted with droning synths, woodwind, gong manipulation (Lewis runs gong baths in her adopted city) and vocals variously sung, spoken and spoke-sung. It’s psychedelic folk, it’s bedroom ambience (see a few reviews down), it’s after-the-afters zoneout soundtracking and you can get the tape from Belfast label Camellia Sinensis.

QUARTET DRAIG tackle Huw Watkins, Dilys Elwyn-Edwards and more

Tŷ Cerdd’s remarkably non-genre-specific sublabel Sionci has just released Gwlad Y Gân, the debut album by Quartet Draig. Royal Welsh College Of Music & Drama alumni, the four members – two violinists and a violist and cellist apiece – are all English but have made it their mission of sorts to explore and platform Welsh classical composition, including where it intersects with folk tradition. This release is split into six subgroupings, including Am Awen, Quartet Draig’s ambitious reassembly of Welsh folk standards. There’s also a vocal-less tilt at Mae Hiraeth Yn Y Môr, by mid-century north Walian Dilys Elwyn-Edwards, and more contemporaneously, a three-part string quartet suite by Huw Watkins that’s apparently never been recorded before.

Stoic philosophy and a serious pedalboard: RUINS BEHELD

The latest name to release music under the banner of the Llandaff Black Covenant is Ruins Beheld, with an album titled Ta Eph’ Hēmin, Ta Ouk Eph’ Hēmin – a Stoic philosophical term, as I discovered shortly before typing this sentence. The LBC, if I may be so familiar, is a notionally black metal-centred operation (as with the fine 2024 album by Wrach, who may well be the same person as Ruins Beheld), but this album goes somewhere slightly different. No riffs or vocals but tons of washed-out murky atmosphere created by, quote, “one acoustic guitar, six reverb pedals, and Erang’s drum samples” – it sounds like something that would have been included on a Bedroom Ambience compilation in the late 90s, which is a niche reference point but a really complimentary one.

Jazzman SAM GREEN leads from the back on accomplished debut album

From Leeds and now in Cardiff having moved south to study at the Royal Welsh College, Sam Green is a jazz drummer and, in this arrangement at least, bandleader. Perhaps counterintuitively, his debut album Rivers And Lakes is not really a drums-forward suite in a way that you’d notice. Assembling a sextet, all of whom study in Cardiff or have done, these eight numbers proclaim to be “inspired by the beauty of northern England” and do feel suitably expansive and verdant, even if this chipper post-bop sort of stuff is urbane city music in a historical sense. The recording, done in Penarth’s Fieldgate Studios, is super nice and there’s a jazzed-up version of Stop This Train by pop sleb turned serious musician John Mayer.

THRONK! pair lighthearted skatepunk with heavy-handed satire

How many skate punk/melodic hardcore bands with frivolous song topics who are nevertheless ‘political’ but in an easygoing BBC2 panel show sort of way does one corner of south Wales need? If your answer is “one, Pizzatramp,” then Thronk! of Newport are here to try and convince you otherwise. Their new EP Kick Me While I’m Down (Engineer) is occasionally semi-serious (Untie Yourself) and tackles semi-serious subjects in lighthearted fashion (There’s No A.I. In Team). There’s also a 50-second number about drinking coffee – perhaps to mark the 30th anniversary of the Descendents having released pretty much the same song – a reference to a cheat code from an early 90s computer game, and Super Mario Clart, a list song concerning what is sometimes called the ‘Deano’ stereotype and which I suspect was taken directly from a Reddit thread on the topic.

True Carmarthenshire black metal: YSBRYDNOS returns with best album yet

Ysbryd, the staunch mid-Walian who makes black metal and dungeon synth as Ysbrydnos, has been missed in these columns in the last two years! (Partly because I missed his last EP from just over a year ago, its proclaimed backstory set in “Crickhowell, 1783”.) With Welsh Mythical Darkness, he has outdone himself with an album of icy riff murkage as no-nonsense as its title. The title track, last of seven on the album, is its longest and best exemplar – bringing some mace-brandishing heavy metal into the picture, not unlike latter-day Darkthrone – and Fullmoon Over Mynyddcerrig, which runs it close for epic duration, gives a (potential) clue to Ysbryd’s location wrapped up in midpaced swagger and double-kick ferocity.

words NOEL GARDNER

Perhaps best known for his role as hapless Father Dougal Maguire in hit 90s sitcom Father Ted, Ardal O’Hanlon’s latest novel A Plot To Die For is the first in a new murder mystery series. Finn O’Leary, celebrity gardener and local hero returns to Abbeyford, his Irish hometown to care for his mother after a recent fall.

Arriving just as the fictional town ramps up activity ahead of the impending national Tidy Towns title, Finn is roped into helping the effort, using his horticultural skills. When a member of the community choir collapses and dies unexpectedly during a rehearsal, Finn and his old acquaintance Aoife transform into amateur detectives as they bid to solve the case and prevent any further disasters. 

A feelgood, community-spirited story full of comedic anecdotes, there’s a unique depth to A Plot…’s characters and community descriptions, offering the perfect way to escape current world events – and, speaking as an avid Father Ted fan, anyone similarly inclined won’t be disappointed with the comedic elements in O’Hanlon’s story. A highly entertaining addition to the cosy crime genre, I’m anticipating the next instalment in this series – I can’t wait to follow this group of characters on their journey.

Some acts are answers to questions you hadn’t thought to ask. Take Spank Hair, for example: the answer to the question, “what if Napoleon Dynamite’s brother Kip listened to a lot of American Football records and formed a band?”

Their Bandcamp strapline, “Just another twinkly emo band”, is on point. Sure enough, the trio have a song that narrates romantic tribulations through references to Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3, and frontman Luke Allmond admits to being a little taken aback when the Cardiff crowd meet his mention of their hometown, Oxford, with some jocular booing. But there’s just enough crunch and bite to stay the right side of dweeby tweemo, and putting the boot into Jeff Bezos is always going to earn approval.

Headliners Toodles & The Hectic Pity are in many respects more of the same: the sort of punk band whose merch desk features badges, zines and bumper stickers as well as vinyl, whose guitarist (Callum McAllister) pauses between songs to push his glasses back up the bridge of his nose, and who are far too well-mannered to generate anything approximating a pit.

McAllister’s electric acoustic lends the Bristolian threesome an added dimension, though, as evidenced on Every Night Is A Beautiful Night, a slip of a song about a cat, and yelpy jiggers like Ducks are always going to go down well in the city that took Los Campesinos! to its heart. “This feels like a hometown show,” McAllister beams, with some justification.

The upbeat mood is apt. This might be promoters DIY Cardiff’s last ever show, but it’s a celebration, not a wake. McAllister thanks them for putting Toodles on “in the early days, when we were shit” – a jokey comment that nevertheless speaks volumes. The likes of DIY Cardiff are among the unsung heroes of local music scenes, putting on shows (often at significant personal effort and indeed personal expense) and giving fledgling bands the opportunity to discover, develop and hone their sound as well as find a fanbase. It’s a vital role, and one that deserves greater recognition and respect.

Toodles & The Hectic Pity + Spank Hair, Clwb Ifor Bach, Cardiff, Sat 16 May

words and photos BEN WOOLHEAD