The traditional music of south Wales has rarely sounded as cosmic as it does in the hands of Huw Marc Bennett. The producer and multi-instrumentalist’s third album, Heol Las (Blue Street) takes traditional tunes from Glamorgan – known for its production of coal and steel, as well as its hills and rugged coastline – and submerges them in languid arrangements, touched by global influences and woozy doses of surf rock and sitar.
As Bennett’s album drifts from the industrial valleys to the Gower peninsula, it thrums with a fitting beauty and energy, Carol Haf (Summer Carol) opens proceedings with pastoral fingerpicking, before a drumbeat breaks the tune into a guitar solo like a meditative raga. Cân y Saer Maen (Stonemason’s Song) builds up a similar heavy magic in the interplay of fuzzy organ, acoustic and electric guitars. When a doomy bass note drops, Seth Bye’s fiddles add contrapuntal layers and the heady air thickens.
Synthesiser-driven tracks such as Cân Gwasael (Wassail Song) and Yr Abaty (The Abbey) sound like lost library-music theme tunes for spooky children’s TV dramas, while Gwenith Gwyn 1837 (White Wheat 1837) marries a forlorn chapel organ with the sound of cascading rain. Y Fedwen (The Birch) is even better, like a sparkling radio-friendly nugget of lost Sain Records psychedelia.
Bennett laces together two tunes transcribed by 18th-century Welsh bard Iolo Morganwg over Yusuf Ahmed’s crunchy drums, and stunning singer Angela Christofilou adds lyrics inspired by Bennett’s nieces being the first generation in his family to experience Welsh-medium education. “Dyma ei geirau ni / Llais yfory / Gadewch i mi chwarae / I bod yn rhydd”, she sings – “these are our words, the voice of tomorrow, let me play, and be free”. Wales’s past meets its future here in revitalising, revelatory sounds and sentiments.
Also out this month
Irish folk guitarist and singer-songwriter Joshua Burnside’s It’s Not Going to Be Okay (Nettwerk) is an arrestingly good album about the death of his best friend. Tracks such as Nicer Part of Town, driven by simple acoustic guitar, bubble with quietly devastating images, while other narratives hit harder: the country-shimmered The Last Armchair is where his friend sat before he died, and where Burnside now eats his breakfast. Finnish duo Akkajee’s Pölynkerääjä (The Dust Collector) (self-released) is full of startling ambition, feeding folk stories and instruments through unusual narrators, including church bells, an abandoned house and a decomposing body. Meriheini Luoto and Iida Savolainen’s vocals tangle like electricity around nyckelharpas, kanteles and ocarinas. Irish-English trio the Weaving’s new album Dlúth & Inneach (Warp & Weft) (self-released) is a gentler bolt of magic for spring, bringing together Méabh Begley’s button accordion, Owen Spafford’s fiddle and Cáit Ní Riain’s piano in brightly glowing tracks.
