This is the second part of the rundown of my Top 10 Favourite Welsh Albums of 2013. It's very much a personal list. Music isn't supposed to be objective, democratic or fair.
I will celebrate the full magnitude of 2013's Welsh Long Play sonic prodigiousness on my show this coming Saturday night at 10pm on BBC Radio Wales. 45 tracks from 45 different albums of Welsh origin. It has been a remarkable year and I aim to prove it, hands-down.
So, back to the Top 10, in no particular order.
Cate Le Bon - Mug Museum
It doesn't matter what mood I'm in – I can be all black ichor, grumpy and numbly depressed – but if I hear Cate's voice, the bad feelings turn to quicksilver and run down between the cracks in the floor and can't reinfect until I stop listening. So I don't stop listening. Even when I'm apparently engaged with other people's music, it's Cate I'm hearing in my head.
I don't know what it is about her voice or her songs. They're impossible, gossamer ladders that lead up into infinite starfields. I don't want to understand how they work. I'd loathe to ruin the magic for myself. Understanding is so overrated.
Cate went to LA to make this album but that's a smog-screen of sorts. Cate's music is in her heart. If she made this album in Jupiter's big ol' red eye, it'd still only sound like Cate Le Bon. That 'only' should be in quotation marks but I hate doing that.
'Oh dear'.
There may be a little more definition to the sound, here. Something about the peripatetic drumming on Are You With Me Now? reminds me of Tangled Up In Blue. It's my favourite song of the year. The proverbial desert island would ring to it day and night and I would discover new dimensions in it every time I listened.
Listen to the woozy tumble of notes in Duke. It's remarkable. Effortless, seemingly; almost Revolver-esque. Little meteors streaking in front of closed eyelids, but in the ear. There is a real synesthetic quality to her music.
And if you've fallen out of love with love, have your soul healed by I Think I Knew. It's falsetto stitches for broken hearts.
Someone once described Cate as “aloof” to me. I can't think of a less accurate word. Her songs are there in the corner of all of our hearts, waiting to be awoken, King Arthur's knights come to protect us from big bad wolves, shameless bankers and drivel heads.
Suitable for: Anyone Who Had A Heart. Older folk who loved Dylan or Mitchell. Younger folk with any degree of teen pop anaemia. Sisters.
Unsuitable for: The dreamless. Sour people behind high fences.
Euros Childs - Situation Comedy
Of course, the finest situation comedies are hinged on the threat of tragedy. Del Boy's obdurate optimism in the face of galloping poverty; Basil Fawlty's sustained, operatic breakdown; the pretty, perfect gloss of Friends mostly obscuring a seething underbelly of psychopathic materialism and empty sexual liaisons.
What do you mean, it was just about the laughs? It's never just about the laughs.
The laughs on Euros' current solo album are in the melodies: McCartney, Nilsson, Rundgren, King and Ayers would doff their caps at the tune mastery on show here. It's Euros' most wonderfully realised set of songs since... well, I think since ever.
The melodies thread together a beguilingly human cast of characters, part Under Milk Wood, part Bonzo Dog Band, all defying dark clouds of one degree or another.
On occasions in the past I've felt that Euros' lyrics were playful or odd for the sake of it but on these last two solo albums, and particularly on Situation Comedy, there's a real emotional grit amongst the wordplay. Holiday From Myself sounds as personal as Euros ever has. Even if he's been telling people it isn't autobiographical, it sure as hell sounds it.
But it's best to obfuscate, to leave us wondering. And there have been few albums in recent years as filled with simple wonders as Situation Comedy; particularly the three opening tracks, blessed as well by Laura J Martin's magic flute.
The opening song, Tete A Tete, tells us that Euros wants to “do so much more than just surviving...” Creatively, regardless of the “corpses beneath my ice rink”, Euros has never sounded more alive. And I'm including Gorky's remarkable recorded legacy in that grandly sweeping statement.
Sing-song tears all down my face. And I'm flipping it over (there's a great vinyl pressing of this) to start all over again.
Suitable for: anyone in the kitchen at parties until they're drunk enough to join the throng. Lonesome sherry Nains. A plaid-shirted country and western uncle. Any brothers with good ears. Jennifer Aniston.
Unsuitable for: gits who claim they don't like tunes. Rachel Green.
