Back in 2000, Super Furry Animals' Mwng became the first Welsh-language album to get into the UK Top 20. It's still the only one to ever dent the charts' upper reaches. There are almost a million Welsh speakers in the UK, but Welsh-language music struggles for recognition outside of Wales. At worst, it's treated as a novelty, a fate that you can only hope doesn't befall Cardiff-born Gwenno Saunders' debut solo album, reissued this week on Heavenly after its initial appearance on local label Peski last year.
Y Dydd Olaf is named for Welsh author Owain Owain's 1976 sci-fi novel in which world-conquering robots turn humans into clones. Nine of its songs are in Welsh while the closing track is in Cornish, which is supposedly the primary language of around 600 people. Saunders used to front kitsch girl-group the Pipettes, which she recently dismissed as "playing a role that had already been written." Y Dydd Olaf also plays into an entrenched role—the gentle Welsh-language pop revolutionary set out by the likes of SFAs and Gorky's Zygotic Mynci—but it's a natural fit for Saunders, who establishes herself as a visionary of synth-pop moods and textures.
Owain's original story is confined to the title track and "Fratolish Hiang Perpeshki", which isn't Welsh, but the nonsense words that his characters start spouting when cyborg forces corrupt their minds. Owain's protagonist, however, retains his individualism by writing diary entries in Welsh, which stops the robots from getting inside his head. Saunders uses that concept to underpin a record about the importance of preserving cultural identity in order to resist corporate death—which in turn, only a relatively tiny audience will actually be able to understand. English notes accompanying the album translate songs that explore the artist's role in a downtrodden society, and the way that technology gives misogyny yet another platform, which compounds the problem of sexism in minority cultures that still promote traditional gender roles. Saunders confronts Cardiff's unimaginative civic planning and highlights the dependable march of nature, weighing up the clash between old and new worlds.
For those without crib notes or a native ear, the idea of language-as-protector shines through in the intimate soundscape that Saunders creates along with her producer husband (and Peski boss) Rhys Edwards. Her palette is kosmische, recalling the likes of Stereolab and Can, but her soft-edged synths, intermingling with field recordings from Cardiff Bay, makes her evocation of space domestic and comforting, like a transmission from a house party on the moon. She has a tendency to stick to one song structure: her languid take on that gorgeously hushed language sits atop an insistent guitar or synth part that spirals somewhere heavenly in the chorus.
The magic, though, is in the spellbinding tones she weaves throughout. The piano on opener "Chwyldro" (revolution) sounds bent and worn, and guides out Cornish closer "Amser" (time). "Fratolish Hiang Perpeshki" sounds like a forlorn death disco for Owain's doomed population. "Stwff" starts with a bright piano recalling the swirl of a French carousel, or Nino Rota's sweeter film scores, though it comes to feel as disquieting as the drowned lounge band swing that underpins "Calon Peiriant" (the heart of the machine).
On "Stwff", a song about growing up and learning how to fit in, Saunders sings (in Welsh): "I can only apologize for feeling the frustration/ Young and ambitious in a minority culture/ I joined the middle but it didn't really impress me." Her treatise on the importance of staying true to your identity finds extra weight in the fact that she tried to live another way and came back, shaken up by the loss she felt during her pop outing. Y Dydd Olaf is a crucial minority language record, but Saunders' beguiling melodies and execution also make it one of the best British debuts of 2015.
