Jude Rogers's folk album of the month

The Guardian

31-01-2025

In the tiny kiln rooms of west Walian mills over a century ago, farmers would tell stories, read verse and sing songs through the night as their oats baked around them. This gathering was a shimli, a Welsh word that falls from the tongue with a similar softness to Carmarthenshire folk singer Owen Shiers's delivery of these 11 quietly political songs.
Recording as Cynefin (a Welsh word for a place where we feel we belong), Shiers's second album mixes traditional ballads, musical settings of poems and originals built on stories collected from rural west Walians, all sung in Welsh. Their arrangements are pastoral and lyrical, weaving in horns, double bass, piano and strings in a way that tilts towards Robert Kirby's work with Nick Drake, while also sounding strangely sun-kissed and filmic (imagine Wales by way of a short hop to Iberia).
In 19th-century fishing ballad Pysgota/Fishing, Shiers's guitar arpeggios echo the ripples of the river Teifi: once, but no longer, a thriving waterway. May carol Mae'r Nen Yn Ei Glesni (The Heavens Are Greening) is warmed into life by the Machynlleth Wind Band, while a spaghetti western flourish fills Shiers's whistling on Cornicyll (Lapwing).
The voices of Shiers's interviewees also open Shili Ga Bwd (Wormwood) and Pont Llanio (a song about a factory that was a thriving community hub now long closed and choked with weeds), recalling King Creosote and Jon Hopkins' moving experiments on 2010's Mercury-nominated Diamond Mine. In his bilingual liner notes, Shiers calls this album 'a stake in the ground for the diverse and the disappearing in our age of homogenisation and mass amnesia', although he foregoes anger in his sound for a gentler sense of contemplation. His voice, plain and unadorned, also veers the album away from easy nostalgia but still offers a cosseting tone of communion.
Gavin Fairhall Lever are composer/fiddler James Patrick Gavin, double-bassist Tim Fairhall and multi-instrumentalist Adrian Lever, and Tearing Down Walls (self-released) is an exhilarating mashing together of Celtic and eastern European traditional music and jazz harmony. Especially thrilling are Set Sail, opened up by the cacophonous gnashing of Gavin's fiddle strings and the shimmering soundworld of Night Sky With Exit Wounds. Jacken Elswyth and poet CA Conrad's collaborative release, A Cast of Flowers (Lanterne Records), is an energising listen, featuring seven beautiful improvisations by Elswyth in response to Conrad's experimental verse (which accompanies it in a beautiful mini-zine). Surprising experiments come, too, in In the Bath, an anthology stacked with folk musicians (and others) covering pop songs. Marry Waterson makes the Spice Girls' Say You'll Be There sound like a Kirsty MacColl original, while Angeline Morrison and her zither nail PJ Harvey's The Dancer.