>>PREVIEW
GRUFF RHYS
Thursday, June 8
MacEwan Hall (U of C)
The Super Furry Animals (SFA) have never done things quite the way the music industry expects them to. Rather than following up their large-scale 1999 Euro-hit Guerrilla album with more of the same, SFA re-emerged with Mwng, a stripped-back album performed entirely in their native Welsh.
Instead of celebrating the 10th anniversary of their debut album, Fuzzy Logic (the ensuing tour for which saw the Super Furries arrive at gigs in a giant tank they’d procured and repainted), with the type of epic stage shows the Super Furry Animals regularly sell out in stadiums across Europe, leader Gruff Rhys has produced instead a charmingly lo-fi solo debut, Yr Atal Genhedlaeth.
"I started thinking about it about three years ago," Rhys recalls. "I made the actual record in about a week – I didn’t think about it too much. The songs just sort of came and seemed to stick together. I write so much, but they just kind of sounded different. Some of these songs are about 10 years old, but I stuck by them."
As an album, Yr Atal Genhedlaeth is a charming mess, the creation of a boundless imagination. While performed in one of the world’s most impenetrable languages, the emotion of the swelling horn-driven ballad "Ambell Waith" and simplistic beauty of "Pwdin Wy 2" cross language barriers with ease. The catchy pop of "Ni Yw y Byd" (punctuated by wolf cries) and ‘Rhagluniaeth Ysgafn’ (over Rhys’s sputtering drum machine, it’s almost easy to sing along) wouldn’t sound out of place on an SFA album, despite their minimalist in comparison approach.
The decision to take his first solo steps strictly in Welsh came easily to Rhys.
"It’s my first language and my first point of expression. It’s strange for me to make English records," he says.
As for the Welsh music scene, which gained attention around the time of Mwng, sharing the spotlight with the likes of Catatonia and Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci, Rhys thinks the time is right to breathe some new life back into it.
"It’s indeed a very good time for Welsh language. There was a particular boom in the 1960s, and now there’s some great Welsh language hip-hop and lots of little indie bands doing well. Actually, it’s been a strong scene for over 1,000 years."
Given his fame both at home and abroad, Rhys’s role in the Welsh music scene is one he considers carefully.
"I’m known internationally and also very well in Welsh-speaking communities. After I started to sing in English, maybe we’ve been a help and a hindrance."
Consider it a balancing of the scales, then, that Yr Atal Genhedlaeth is bringing Rhys over to Canadian soil for his first cross-country tour.
Still, he’s certain the indecipherable-to-most lyrics won’t be a barrier to his connecting to an audience.
"People are generally open-minded, and things are judged on the music and passion and the tunes. Music is any language as long as it’s groovy. Occasionally they ask for the meaning and I’m always interested to help. Generally people listen more and think less in North America. Back in Britain and Wales, people just want drunken freakouts and exploding music. There’s never enough time for the slow stuff."
Perhaps most exciting for Rhys is the act of stripping back and facing an audience alone, with nothing more than 10 years’ worth of tunes and an acoustic guitar under his arm.
"It’s completely different this way. Super Furry Animals is all about excess. For the most part, it’s a wall of sound. Mostly this time I’m singing for me."
There’s also an element of the sightseer at work in Rhys as well. The sole question he asks back during our interview is a simple, "Can you see the mountains from Calgary? I really just want to see the mountains." |
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