Nick Bollinger reviews an orchestral and apocalyptic set from Welsh alt-pop artist Gruff Rhys.
Gruff Rhys Photo: Andy Martin - martintype.co.uk
Modern life offers plenty of material for the sharp-eyed commentator to turn into song, but it’s still the old-fashioned forms they fall back on.
On his latest solo album it’s apparent that, whatever else is occupying his thoughts, Gruff Rhys’s musical mind is somewhere deep in the 60s. With those swelling strings and female chorus vocals shoring up his own burred approximation of a country-politan melody, it’s like a Lee Hazelwood record that was lost half a century ago and rediscovered in Cardiff.
Babelsberg Photo: supplied
Babelsberg is the fifth solo album the Welsh singer and songwriter has made since he started interspersing these with the releases of his band Super Furry Animals back in the early noughts.
But it’s also very much a collaboration. The songs are Rhys’s, but the orchestrations are by fellow Welshman Stephen McNeff, and they play a huge part in the production. McNeff did the arrangements which are played by the 72-piece BBC National Orchestra of Wales. And stripped of those orchestrations, songs like these would be naked offerings indeed.
It’s not an obvious fit – McNeff’s perky arrangements and Rhys’s hungover Welsh baritone – but the uneasiness between the two is actually what makes it work so well. Like Leonard Cohen in his synth-and-drum-machine phase, Rhys sounds at odds with his environment, which is in fact what most of his songs are about. The musical signposts are all towards the 60s, yet Rhys’s eye is on the present, and it’s a gloomy place. Babelsberg, he calls it, and if that sounds like a cross between the Biblical Babylon and some modern suburban Nowheresville, that might well be where Rhys’s droll observations of human folly are taking place.
His songs pivot on lovely little turns of phrase, like the ‘pixelated courtesans’ of ‘Oh Dear!’, or ‘Selfies in the Sunset’, a duet with the English actress Lily Cole, that pictures a couple social media junkies taking and posting selfies during a nuclear holocaust, even though they obviously won’t be getting many likes.
Babelsberg is a good bunch of tunes given extra grandeur by their lavish orchestrations. There are moments where that orchestra might seem to be the most interesting thing going on; but then another droll couplet will tumble out of Gruff Rhys’s mouth – ‘history lessons disappear/architecture of amnesia’ - and pull it all back from the brink of retro and into a familiar and discomforting present.
