Are there many veterans of the 90s indie scene as adventurous as the mighty Gruff Rhys? The Cool Cymru figurehead, Super Furry Animal, and resistor of phoney encores has journeyed across North America with a felt totem of his ancestor for a sidekick. He’s travelled to Patagonia’s Welsh-speaking colonies in search of a long-lost relative. He’s written an album inspired by Paektu Mountain and recorded in the Mojave Desert.
On his eighth solo album, Sadness Sets Me Free, he and his band bring this restless spirit to France’s La Frette Studios, and collecting songs that ‘feel melancholic’ is Rhys’s thesis. Could he be finally settling into his middle years by way of a chansonnier phase? Slipping on a suit and crooning about ennui would seem to suit the reflective, intelligent Rhys, but the title track which opens the album suggests nothing so obvious.
Instead, the tinkling honky-tonk of ‘Sadness Sets Me Free’ guides us into a countrypolitan ballad, with This Is the Kit’s Kate Stables serving up harmonies. If there is a touch of Jacques Brel in his witty, rakish lyricism, this is a tendency which has threaded throughout his whole career. As the track breaks into an ‘Unchained Melody’ arpeggio, floating over a plush bed of strings, the result recalls the louche lipstick-marked luxury we last heard in Rhys’s own late-capitalist chronicle Babelsberg, the best record Glenn Campbell never made.
Should this all sound a little wistful for your taste, the soul-searching we’re treated to on ‘Bad Friend’ takes an altogether sparkier, larkier tenor. Set to the feather-light guiding hand of his arrangements, Rhys’s dry humour keeps his formidable (in both the French and English sense) pop nous from capitulating to the treacly or the overbearing.
‘You know I’m as reliable as asking a seal to deliver the post,’ he purrs, ‘or a random Pokémon to remember the number of your phone’. His words may paint him as flaky, but who wouldn’t want a friend with such a knack for evocatively surreal similes?
Such gentleness may come as a surprise if you know Rhys only from the Super Furries, but his eagerness to swashbuckle through modes and genres remains undiminished. ‘Celestial Candyfloss’ sees him using his distinctive honeyed lilt to full advantage in a song as fluffy and sweet as its title suggests, flavoured with a pick and mix of 70s pop flourishes that would do Todd Rundgren proud. Here’s a pulsing piano rhythm, there’s a string section or soft rock guitar solo.
The tuneful, Motown-tinged ‘Silver Lining (Lead Balloons)’ is more comforting still. Every swirl of strings, skitter of drums, and blast of brass jolts it with joy. Rhys’s words are wry all the same – ‘there’s no use lining all your dreams with silver / For silver lining clouds look much like lead balloons’ is hardly your old-school Disney material.
Mind you, he’s too open-hearted and humanistic to stay staring at his navel. His grounded, reassuring vocal implies that he’s aiming his warm advice out towards the listener. It’s proof that pop need not relax into simple escapism to uplift.
This thoughtful spirit may be most pronounced when Rhys turns his mind to politics over the album’s darker second half. The more relaxed arrangements that ‘On The Far Side of the Dollar’ boasts lend the lyrics enough space to cut across clearly, making their quiet despair at the grim global conditions our governments permit and perpetuate all the more powerful.
But it’s ‘They Sold My Home To Build A Skyscraper’ that makes the greatest use of Rhys’s strengths. Over an engaging backing steeped in the sounds and rhythms of Brazilian tropicália, he criticises the all-consuming corporate drive towards unlimited growth, encouraging you to take up your creativity in response and ‘keep on glowing in the dark’.
If you’re a fan of French pop, the rubbery woof of a cuíca drum on this track is likely to remind you of ‘Bonnie and Clyde’ – not the bank robbers themselves, hopefully, but Serge Gainsbourg and Brigitte Bardot’s impossibly smoky duet. But Rhys’s good-natured radicalism has more in common with the international perspective of, to name another Parisian, Manu Chao. You’re welcomed into his worldview not as a passive consumer but an active participant.
‘Cover Up The Cover Up’ is especially striking, with Rhys’s softly sung calls to ‘reinvent the government’ and ‘overthrow the monarchy and private school system’ set to velvety cello and sonar-like guitar, a languid, beautiful backdrop as elegant as they come. Does this contrast spike the message with ironic acquiescence, or sincere and stirring hope? That’s up to your own worldview.
A major part of Rhys’s magic is his consistent refusal to take a straight line when a more scenic route is available. ‘I Tendered My Resignation’ sounds as though it should be a calming ambient piece or a straightforward romantic ballad, with its cosmic pedal steel and billowing strings. Not so! He pokes at the form by cramming stilted, verbose lyrics into undersized, syllabically unbalanced lines to subtle comic effect.
‘I tendered my resignation,’ he sings, ‘as I felt I’d gone beyond what was respectful in this relationship’. Like a less jokey answer to the Divine Comedy’s white-collar Ian Dury pastiche ‘Absolutely Obsolete’, the clinical language of employment hints at a more intimate heartache underneath.
And yet optimism wins out in the end, as bluesy closer ‘I’ll Keep Singing’ builds to a celebratory conclusion with its chugging piano and squawking saxophone. ‘I’m going for euphoric melancholy,’ says Rhys on his overarching aim for the record, and he’s managed that all right. Throughout Sadness Sets Me Free, delight and pain chase one another in an intoxicating dance.
But as he weds his staunch sense of compassion and humour to a richly communicative song-writing skill, the theme runs deeper than the bittersweet impressionism this might suggest. For all the record’s stylish ornamentation, Rhys shakes his head at our dismal present with clear eyes while sounding an inspirational note of solidarity for his listeners, and all to a delicious assortment of tunes. Mae’n ffantastig.
Sadness Sets Me Free is released on Friday 26th January – pre-order via Rough Trade Records
Find out more about Gruff Rhys on his official website
Review by Poppy Bristow
Photography by Mark James
Keep up to date with all new content on Joyzine via our
Facebook / Twitter / Instagram / Mailing List