Gwenno - Y Dydd Olaf (Heavenly,2015)
“Her solo debut channels Broadcast and Boards Of Canada via fragrant kosmische grooves as she sings a socialist manifesto…"
As a member of girl group throwbacks The Pipettes, Gwenno Saunders pulled shapes and made the indie boys swoon with bundles of flirty, razor-tongued sass and polka dot, ’60s, pop joy. Now singing in Welsh to a lush, swirling, electro backdrop, her solo debut Y Dydd Olaf marks a radical change.
The concept album, which translates to The Last Day, is inspired and named after Owain Owain’s dystopian 1970s sci-fi novel and positons Saunders as a retro-futurist, Barbarella-type chanteuse. Lending her angelic whisper to Casio blips and bleeps, she drifts into a dreamy melancholy whilst pondering Owain’s tales of a totalitarian future overrun by robots.
To a non-Welsh speaker, the dialect adds to the alien, lost in space feel, with the track ‘Calon Peiriant’ (Heart Machine) in particular, sounding android and lonesome. Saunders’ love of a sugar sweet melody still shimmers through, but it’s pitched alongside primitive Motorik beats, odes to national pride and an air of Orwellian doom. It all conjures up memories of acts such as Saint Etienne, Nico and Cocteau Twins and dances between paranoid, industrial coldness and blissful synth-pop.
Citing influences as diverse and obscure as cult Welsh artists Malcolm Neon and Datblygu, Saunders emerges as a much more esoteric and philosophical character than her playful Pipette persona ever hinted at. She struts away to a weird ’90s Euro-trance club anthem on Patriarchaeth, before Golau Arall unsettles and creeps like a David Lynch soundtrack made by Goldfrapp. As if things aren’t head-scratching enough, there’s even a Cornish-language poem written by her father to round things off.
It all adds up to a pretty remarkable reinvention and album of leftfield synth-pop that is dark and mysterious enough to beguile in any language.
