![]() Switching vocalists and vocal effects helps give the set a theatrical clarity as different characters come on and offstage, each searching for something or pondering some question they can’t answer. There’s the same determination to tell epic tales on an intimate, and sometimes preposterously intimate scale. It’s funny but also possessed of the kind of deadly serious conviction you’d find in the no-budget intergalactic visions that make Funkadelic or classic era Doctor Who so compelling. She’s a sad supernova in any case and you’d probably best get out of her way whatever she’s up to. With the assistance of a very silly electronic vocal effect, Pilkington reels off fetishistic sci-fi jargon: “ Tiny tiny tiny tiny tiny witch hunter / laser laser laser laser laser-propelled / into into into into into the dark / searching for a flicker flicker flicker”, and it’s not clear if she’s a tiny hunter who is a witch or something tiny embarking on a witch hunt. ![]() It’s clearest in the deadpan soliloquy of brooding menace and mystical longing that is ‘ Tiny Witch Hunter’. The wisely judged beats and loops laid down by Bothwell and Pilkington provide a good solid synth-pop bedrock for these grandiose fantasies and keep us firmly away from more extravagantly psychedelic territory. ‘ Dyma Fy Robot‘, which doesn’t quite convince on album drifts off on a satisfyingly Sun Ra tangent tonight, and it’s worth noting the debt to Afro-futurism, both in terms of it’s artistic and implied political intent, but also in its playfulness and keen sense of its own absurdity. But I was there and I saw: The dude plays a harp. Not once did it sound like a harp, and listening to the album again today, part of me still doesn’t quite accept the evidence of my own eyes. It rips up tense lead guitar lines or makes belligerent, prog excursions into trippy jazz. His harp looks like something from the set of Blake’s 7, and he makes it do awful things that no harp should ever have to do. In comparison with the firepower he’ll bring to solo favourites like ‘ Poor Old Horse‘, he hardly breaks a sweat. Banks Culture novel, an impossibly ancient mind, imprisoned, tortured, feeding on its own regret and reflecting on a glassy, dead world from a mountaintop. He’s every inch the anti-hero of an Iain M. He’s started letting the material do the work now and it’s a revelation. Tonight though, he seems relaxed, even when delivering the power-pop diatribe that is ‘ Problem Child‘ – and if ever there was a song that might have required the full Dawson, this was it. He pushes his vocals and his whole body farther than seems wise. Whenever I’ve seen him live his performances have been so raw and looked so physically painful that I’m always left fearful for the man’s health. Coal and steel made Wales’ connection with modernity a chthonic one and our era’s links with the spectral and persistent traces of a vanished world seem to make sense here.Īnyone hoping for what we shall refer to as the full Dawson will be slightly disappointed. ![]() We’re imbued with it around here, familiar as we are with the dystopian vision of Gwenno’s Y Dydd Olaf, itself based on Owain Owain’s 1976 Welsh language sci-fi novel about a man resisting a tyrannical machine world. Quite how this ties up with science fiction, we’ll see, suffice to say this is an audience well versed in Celtic futurism. It’s closely related to modern Cymraeg, and part of the conceit is that the band’s four members are drawn from the four ancient Brythonic tribes. Not only that, but ‘Hen Ogledd’ means ‘the Old North’ in Brythonic, the language spoken by the ancient Celtic peoples who occupied the land between Aberystwyth and Newcastle. As a consequence Chapter is packed out with a very receptive audience. The last time Hen Ogledd put an album out Dawson’s star was already rising, but since the release of 2017’s superlative double LP Peasant, he’s quite rightly become a bona fide indie rock god. This trick is partly carried off by the presence of three sharply distinct lead vocalists, Sally Pilkington, Dawn Bothwell and the inestimable Richard Dawson, and partly by Rhodri Davies’ astonishing harp playing. The record’s ten songs sprint through social media, synth pop, robotics, ancient languages, freeform harp improvisation, and other insoluble mysteries, its style and emotional tenor shifting in an assured and occasionally very daft manner. Hen Ogledd are in Cardiff tonight to promote their new LP Mogic, an enquiry into the musical interstices between magic and logic.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |