Gwenno released her wonderful debut album ‘Y Dydd Olaf’ a few weeks back on Peski recordings, a label currently releasing some excellently innovative records from artists throughout Wales. Sung in both her native tongues of Welsh and Cornish, it’s an album concerned with feminism and political and cultural revolution(from Scotland, Wales to the Basque countries) perhaps informed by her experiences both inside and outside the music industry and the Welsh culture that she see’s at threat. But each of these missives is coated in a sense of pop otherness that orbits a delightful place between the French noir-electro cool of Saint Etienne and the melodic maneuvers that hint of early Bjork. Disrupting the cliché that Cymruag is a language made up of guttural vowel sounds only, Gwenno possesses the ability to make the Welsh language sound alluring and incisive, at once.
Today’s track is ‘Fratolish Hiang Perpeshki’ which is a reference to Owain Owain’s 1976 novel (‘Y Dydd Olaf’) about a dystopian future where the robots have taken over and are busily turning the human race into clones through the use of medication. Is shot through with Gwenno’s icy cool yet sweetly piercing melodies, propelled by beats and synths that shed neon spotlights to guide the way. Gwenno says it’s ‘a song to dance to at the end of the world”, the crescendo of the last minute in particular reminds one of the work of OMD soundtracking a disco on a lunar surface, skilful utilising both modern production techniques and 70s synth machinery that gives this record at once a timelessly transfixing yet thought provoking quality…
