Hen Ogledd makes foreground music. Their new album, Discombobulated (Domino), would never work as sonic padding in beige cafés or fluorescent supermarkets, a background texture to distract us from the mundane terror of another day in a soft hell. These are songs that demand attention and reward deep focus. There are treasures buried here, and every listen reveals more.
As the title hints, the record deals with the confusion and apprehension of living through the current moment. But the sounds and poetry of Discombobulated also reverberate with joy, in a kind of primordial socialism, the power of collective action and protest, our connections to one another and to the natural world. It’s a record of improbable anthems for radical change, not through the promises of capital or technology, but by re-grounding ourselves in community and nature. It’s both a wrestling match with and a balm for anxiety.
It’s also a lot of fun. Like all the best kinds of fun, it comes from the darkness, and it has very sharp teeth. But even at their most biting, these songs are mirthful, often celebratory, and point to a way out.
The ghost of Ursula K LeGuin is here somewhere, and the voices of children. There’s at least one horse, and there is wind, and there are bugs. There are opportunities to learn some Welsh, and a bit of Finnish. Many times, you will wonder “what is making that sound?” and ultimately you may never know, but you will love that sound for itself without needing to give it a name.
Hen Ogledd has always made music that sounds like being in a band is the most fun you can possibly have. Yet the members’ individual sensibilities invariably shine through, shaped by years of omnivorous artistic curiosity and exploration. I won’t spoil the joy of ‘doing your own research,’ as our friends in the troll community say, but if you unravel this knit, the yarny tangle will lead you everywhere: from experimental organ recitals to film festivals to unsettling ceramics, from the prolific lockdown project Bulbils to performances of the work of musique concrète composer and synth pioneer Elaine Radigue, collaborations with the Finnish experimental metal band Circle, and the many surprising things you can do with wind, fire, water, and a harp.
The result of all that artistic voraciousness is Hen Ogledd’s openminded and fundamentally playful approach to music. None of the sounds on Discombobulated – Rhodri Davies’ electric harp and Welsh poetry; seemingly everything with keys that Sally Pilkington and Dawn Bothwell can get their hands on, plus percussion and Northumbrian smallpipes; Richard Dawson’s crucial, woody bass lines – could be made in the same way by anyone else. The sounds they make with their voices are no less astonishing, such as what Dawn Bothwell has called the ‘bard rap’ she showcases on the first single, ‘Scales Will Fall.’ But my favourite thing is hearing the blend of all of them singing together, sometimes being able to distinguish each from each, sometimes not.
There are also many special guests here, including the aforementioned children and horse, as well as a trio of instrumental heavyweights who take this already-wide-ranging music even deeper into uncharted territory. Will Guthrie’s drumming is inventive and jubilant throughout, but never more so than on the nearly three-minute freakout introduction to ‘Clear Pools,’ where the drums sound like they were recorded with one microphone at the bottom of an actual pool, and then the signal was sent at an impossible volume to a children’s cassette player, which then exploded with the excitement of it all. Fay MacCalman’s woodwinds and Nate Wooley’s trumpet add gravity but also lightness, occasionally pushing through to the surface with celebratory abandon (as in the trumpet solo in the middle of ‘Scales Will Fall’, which builds in tension to deliver what I can only compare to a climactic beat drop in the kind of dance club I was too shy to go to when I was at the age when I should have been going to dance clubs).
I’m always a fan of the album as a world-building device rather than a container for singles, and Hen Ogledd create a storied universe here. Young Nell sets the tone with a short prologue that hints at the darkness and magic to follow, then the gauntlet of the first single is thrown, followed by ‘Dead in a Post-Truth World,’ a blistering critique of the right-wing pustule festering on the skin of society. ‘Clara’ offers a broken lullaby about a horse (and probably also death), in English and Welsh, its stuttering melody underlined by piano and saxophone. I’ve been waking up with the chorus of this song in my head every morning, and you need to hear it to understand how wonderful and disturbing that experience is. It’s accompanied by a stunning video (and web-based maze, naturally) created by artist James Hankins, who also directed videos for ‘Scales Will Fall’ and ‘End of the Rhythm,’ the frantic anthem that closes Side A. From the candy-coloured album cover (an original painting by Dawson and Pilkington, cut up into dozens of pieces and sent around the world) to the handmade costumes in their music videos, the members of Hen Ogledd are involved in most dimensions of their art, but they also really know the right people to call when they want an extra comrade or two to augment their vision.
They are also deft crafters of tension and release, both with music and language. ‘Amser a ddengys,’ a brief, joyful multipart chorus that my translation app tells me centres on the idea that ‘time will tell,’ opens Side B. Growing up in Canada, I haven’t encountered many reasons to learn Welsh. But by the time the record closes with ‘Land of the Dead’ – which is in Welsh, despite the title, and which the band has mercifully translated in the lyrics sheet – my mind is made up, and I’m busily typing “Cyrsiau Cymraeg yn fy ymyl” into my browser. No luck so far. But I appreciate that the Welsh language as featured on Discombobulated is not deployed as an exotic decoration; Rhodri Davies’ poetry is a crucial element throughout, and ‘Land of the Dead’ is a fitting epilogue, a capstone that echoes the playfulness and shadow of everything that came before.
But the centrepiece of Side B is the 20-minute epic ‘Clear Pools,’ the most stunning piece of music I’ve heard in a long time. The hypnotic catharsis that slowly unfolds throughout the song is both emotional and musical (a long, slow chord progression circling around and around in unsettling bliss), and it offers a version of hope at the end of the dark tunnel the band has led us down. These days, I think we need to seize hope wherever we can find it.
Hen Ogledd’s records embody what is good and human about making music, about the joy of the collective, spontaneous creation, improvisation, and storytelling. They are the band I imagine leading a troupe of nomadic players after the great collapse, as in Emily St. John Mandell’s novel Station Eleven, or a slightly less menacing version of the nuclear-tinged Punch & Judy show in Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker. I hope I’m around to join in, and I hope you are too. As we step over the broken carcasses of digital assistants and rotten flags decomposing into moss, I hope we can find our own clear pool at the centre of the forest. “Now, look around / everything’s alive and new / world, unfurls / clarity returns to you.”
Discombobulated is out now on Domino Records. Order on vinyl, CD and digital download via Bandcamp
Hen Ogledd: Website / Facebook / Instagram / Bandcamp
Review by Mathias Kom
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