Gwenno’s new album Utopia is one of those records in an artist’s career that acts as a milestone, a waypoint between the journey behind and the journey ahead, and it is achingly beautiful. It is replete with musical vignettes of a life lived with its title being named partly in honour of her time in Las Vegas starring in Michael Flatley’s Lord of the Dance. Every weekend the cast would go clubbing: “every Saturday we’d go to this techno club called Utopia and just get completely spangled until Monday, when we had to go back to work.”
Las Vegas to Europe then London saw a nocturnal Gwenno Saunders inhabiting the bars of Dalston while attempting to make club hits, going to auditions from adverts in The Stage magazine before joining and recording two albums with Brighton band The Pipettes. Post-hedonism, and feeling the nihilism of her London years, she moved back to Wales, “I think so much about going back to Wales was finding the root of something again, and not retreating as much as healing, and reviving, and digging the earth, and turning it over. I just creatively needed to go back to the start.”
This second act of Gwenno’s life brought a run of incredible music: Y Dydd Olaf (inspired by Owain Owain’s 1976 novel The Last Day), Le Kov (written entirely in Cornish), and the pinnacle of this triumvirate Tresor; albums where the beauty of language, when coming from Gwenno’s warm zephyr of a voice, is mixed with the gentle pulse of electronic and organic instruments making for a beguiling combination.
And now we arrive in Utopia, the starting point of which was not electronic, as with previous releases, but the piano (apart from ‘Hireth’ which started out on the harp). Maybe it is this organic beginning that so suits the intimacy and self-reflection of the songs. Synthesisers and electronics can generate mood and rhythm for inspiration but the act of sitting in front of a keyboard would explain why Utopia feels so personal. It moves effortlessly between the many phases of her life, from past decadence ceding to parenthood on ‘Dancing on Volcanoes’, to the move from London (where she had family connections) back to Wales on ‘73’. Gwenno says,
“I feel as if I’ve written a debut record, because it’s a different language and it’s a different part of my life,” she says. “It’s about that point where I go out into the world on my own, which people generally write about first, and then get on with their lives. But it’s taken me so long to digest it — I needed 20 years just to make sense of things, and I realised the starting point of my creative life isn’t Wales, it’s actually North America.”
This more human aspect was also reflected in the recording process where everything was captured in Gwenno’s living room with a full band. This gives the live quality that the The Wrecking Crew brought to so many classic songs. Utopia has that same dampened bass sound which rarely stays on the root for too long, some inspired guitar playing reminiscent of the wonderful phrasing of Prefab Sprout’s Paddy McAloon, and keyboards that provide taffeta swish as well as lush strings. There is also the tingle of harp and drums that anchor everything becoming the beating heart of the album. She says that these songs that perhaps “can’t be made by a machine…only be made by human experience,” giving them “a far more potent value.”
This feels as much a photographic album and a musical one. A trip through her life that could easily work as performance with stories (‘An Evening with Gwenno’ anyone?). There is a touch of Las Vegas glitter and Hollywood glamour woven in, Astaire and Rogers dancing on that volcano, the descent down a massive staircase to ‘Ghost of You’, the ‘On Broadway’ bounce of ‘The Devil’ through to the title track which seems to fit perfectly with the wee small hours when the rat pack have loosened their bowties and everyone is warmly slurring into their breakfast martinis. It is also ‘Utopia’ that has one of the album’s highlights: the profoundly exquisite moment when the verse has the most beatific ascent into the chorus. Heady stuff.
Viva Gwenno! She now belongs to an exclusive group of musicians who can be identified with a mononym: Madonna, Prince, Cher, and Björk and she has the talent to match (although how many on that list can say they are trilingual?). She could spellbind a folk club if the songs were stripped back to just piano and voice, or she could dazzle a mainstage audience at Glastonbury with a full band line-up and Vegas-bright lighting. This is an intoxicating musical autobiography which draws you in like an old friend visiting to share stories of the past while celebrating how perfect it is in the present. I’ll leave the last word to her,
“You get to this point and you go ‘God, that quarter of a century went fast.’ But I want to acknowledge it, and respect it and say, for better or worse, all of that happened.”
Gwenno: Website | Facebook | Bandcamp | Instagram | YouTube
Gwenno on tour:
Monday 14th July – Bristol – Rough Trade
Tuesday 15th July – Cardiff – Spillers
Wednesday 16th July – London – Rough Trade Denmark street
Thursday 17th July – Brighton – Resident Brighton
Saturday 16th August – Crickhowell – Green Man Festival
Wednesday 29th October – Exeter – Phoenix
Thursday 30th October – Southampton – Papillion
Friday 31st October London – EartH
Saturday 1st November – Manchester – The White Hotel
Monday 3rd November – Leeds – Belgrave Music Hall
Tuesday 4th November – Glasgow – Nice n Sleazy
Friday 7th November – Bethesda – Neuadd Ogwen
Saturday 8th November – Blackpool – Bootleg Social
Sunday 9th November – Birmingham – The Castle & Falcon
Tuesday 11th November – Cardiff – New Theatre
Friday 14 November – Brighton – St Luke’s
Saturday 15th November – Falmouth – Princess Pavilion
Review by Paul F Cook
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