Gruff Rhys - The Hairy Bard

Not just Super Furry Animals.

A monographic study setting out to retrace the deeds of Gruffudd Maredudd Bowen “Gruff” Rhys, who both was and remains the undisputed leader and genuine creative engine of the legendary Welsh psych-pop-rock outfit, could hardly do without a subtitle like that. True, at the helm of the Furries Rhys wrote, played and sang the most unforgettable pages of his career, across a decade and a half unrivalled for inventiveness and explosiveness. Yet the band's extended hiatus, combined with his frontman's tireless creative drive, spread across a thousand branches of a (not only) musical ambition that is nothing short of volcanic, shows just how unfair it would be to sum up his entire songwriting adventure by that one, admittedly fortunate, chapter alone. To be honest, we shouldn't forget the earlier chapter either, the youthful and proudly homegrown one of Ffa Coffi Pawb, but that's another story entirely and would take us well off track. What we want to stress here is how, even in his mature years, with success already guaranteed, Gruff has managed to offer his admirers extremely original albums while moving, as far as possible, away from the established clichés and the headlong psychedelia of the band for which he'll be remembered.

The son of a couple of poets deeply bound to Wales's cultural and linguistic traditions, Rhys could hardly settle for the reductive label of rock star, and so it was inevitable that he'd reinvent himself as a modern-day bard: not just a singer-songwriter but an explorer of places, languages and art forms, often roaming the world yet always keeping his homeland as an essential compass for the heart.

Singing On My Own

His first break away from the quintet only materialises in January 2005, roughly a decade after it all began, when the singer releases Yr Atal Genhedlaeth on Placid Casual. The Gruff of this solo debut is the same Gruff of Super Furry Animals, only in a bare-bones package, with his headlong freak outfit pulled out of the wardrobe for the occasion. This collection of shaggy lo-fi pop kicks off with a killer little tune, “Gwn Mi Wn”, which is all refrain and perfectly captures the spirit of the record. Fragmentary, rough-edged, crumpled and forever teetering on the edge of a joke like his pals Gorky's Zygotic Mynci, Rhys thrives above all on the contagious pull of a melodicism bordering on the unrestrained, as well as on the likeable, roguish extravagance of his galloping weirdness. Clearly he's not called upon to reinvent himself here, and indeed he simply dresses up his best ideas with flourishes and plays himself with no filter whatsoever. There's no shortage of earthier, more danceable passages, driven by drum machine but always energised by the Welshman's prodigious knack for a singalong (“Rhagluniaeth Ysgafn”), alongside noisier, no-frills outlets (the adorable “Y Gwybodusion”, lifted by a wheezing little organ seemingly swiped from a child) or the occasional foray into more austere intimacy, above all the closer “Chwarae'n Troi'n Chwerw” (which still doesn't give up that radiant, confiding tone of his, nor the magnetism of a rustic, magically timeless music).

The synthetic smudges lend a human touch to a handful of lilting, miniaturised stately splendour, not unlike what Jason Lytle was doing in Grandaddy (and would soon do in his own solo venture). Where the lice-ridden electronics are left out instead, our man enchants with the purity of simplicity or sublime fragility, as on the little gem “Pwdin Wy 2” or the crystalline folk of “Ambell Waith”, genuinely in the territory of the most inspired Euros Childs. It may be unassuming as a solo debut, but the entertainment on offer remains finely grained, and the good impressions gathered across its barely half-hour runtime prove considerable, as exquisite as the saccharine bucolic lilt of “Ni Yw Y Byd”. Gruff's scatterbrained psych-pop doesn't betray the Furries aesthetic so much as confine it to a domestic dimension, with pleasingly boisterous, slapdash results that make for a fine contrast with its more “winged” moments.

Once the flagship band's stint with Sony is over, Gruff and co. settle at Rough Trade, a label that within a few months releases both “Hey Venus!” and the singer's sophomore effort, Candylion.

Just the sheer care put into its oddities is enough to tell you this is a more polished work. If the folk-pop of the title track proves nothing short of delightful, with the singer drawing on airy yet substantial arrangements to indulge a fairy-tale register without ever tipping into mawkishness, the easy-listening showmanship is certainly not in short supply either, even if it's exercised here in a more intimate, largely acoustic setting, with more than a few occasional brass-band flourishes that make the whole thing infectious and consistently rather irresistible (“The Court Of King Arthur”).

Not a full-blown celebration, then, but rather a measured little work that opts for muted shades over the bright, boisterous colours of his band; a small record, extraordinarily fresh and varied, in which the irrepressible eclecticism of a singer-songwriter as unusual as he is imaginative shines through, kept from ever tipping into mannerism by his refined talent as a songwriter and omnivorous arranger, well balanced even in his flair for the theatrical. Such oddball detours have always been second nature to this sophisticated pop craftsman, who seems to come most alive when dressing up his songs with string flourishes.

This time round things range from the subtle folktronic transfigurations of “Con Carino”, deployed for some most welcome saturation, to the assorted choral delicacies and Sixties cinematic temptations of “Painting People Blue”, by way of the stylistic blender (with jazzy leanings) of “Now That The Feeling Has Gone” or the hammy country-western posturing of “Lonsome Words”, with results that are cheesy but also exquisitely inspired.

The tone stays remarkably light throughout, somewhere between a wink at the Beck of “Tropicalia” and a soft spot for nursery-rhyme whimsy, playful disengagement verging on the outright flamboyant (“Gyrru Gyrru Gyrru”), and ultimately Rhys proves no less endearing when he shows up again in slippers, scattershot, meandering yet almost homely in his tricks (“Ffrwydriad Yn Y Ffurfafen”). Granted, the polished craftsmanship partly disavows the rawer production of the debut, and stands out as a true constant of Candylion, on a par with his proverbial fondness for curious digression.

The album would seem to find a semblance of normality right at the close with the wordy little fable “Skylon!”, were it not for the fact that the storyteller has fun stretching it out for a quarter of an hour (without ever being boring, mind you), complete with spoken word and lush instrumental arrangements.

And now for something completely different…

Gruff Rhys is clearly not the type to sit still. No sooner have we caught up with his dizzying back-and-forth between solo outings and work with Super Furry Animals than he pops up somewhere else entirely, in a collaboration that's downright disorienting after the now-distant one with Mogwai on “Rock Action“. It's the first in a long string of moves that will later see him land on the dancefloor of Simian Mobile Disco's “Temporary Pleasure”, among the ghosts of Danger Mouse and Sparklehorse on the unforgettable “Dark Night Of The Soul“, drunk on hip-hop on the plastic beach of Gorillaz in a duet with De La Soul, or a surprise guest on stage at the Manic Street Preachers' self-celebratory show at London's O2 Arena in 2011. Yet the partnership with Californian DJ, producer and remixer Bryan Hollon, aka Boom Bip, is the one side venture that bore lasting fruit on record, if we leave aside the thoroughly negligible album he made with Brazilian artist Tony Da Gatorra some time later.

After a first vocal appearance on Hollon's 2005 record, “Blue Eyed In The Red Room”, Gruff and his partner-in-crime launched the Neon Neon project in 2008, making a fair bit of noise – partly thanks to the usual crowd of guest appearances (Fab Moretti of The Strokes, Spank Rock and a grab-bag of other names), but mostly thanks to the explosive freshness of the project, which earned them a Mercury Prize nomination. There was also the sheer oddness of the idea itself: a rather bizarre synth-dance concept album centred on the exploits of the reckless American car designer and playboy John DeLorean. Booming eighties eclecticism (“I Told Her On Alderaan”), garish vocoder flourishes (“I Lust U”, a fizzy duet with fellow Welsh artist Cate Le Bon), and sprightly hybrids of classic rock, crowd-pleasing tribalism, chillwave and hip-hop frame Stainless Style (released on Lex, a Warp subsidiary, in March 2008) as a sprightly, original and thoroughly enjoyable record, one in which the “orthodox” Rhys surfaces only in a handful of adulterated traces, as in the remarkable “Steel Your Girl”.

Meanwhile, the Welsh musician's boundless inventiveness had already moved on elsewhere. In 2010, an independent film directed by Dylan Goch was released, a bizarre documentary centred on Gruff's recent trip to Patagonia, got up as a cut-price Power Ranger. Mixing humour, historical inquiry, an offbeat songbook and a scattershot collection of kitsch gags, “Separado!” uses as its pretext the search for an obscure author of Welsh pop songs and ballads (sung in the style of the Pampas cowboys), René Griffiths, who vanished without trace in that remote Argentine region in the late 1960s and whom Gruff claims was a distant relative of his. It's also an opportunity – amid a comic interlude with Scotland's King Creosote and another with little-known Brazilian artist Tony Da Gatorra – to tell the story of the many Welsh emigrants who left Wales at the end of the nineteenth century chasing the utopian dream of a paradise free of the English, only to run into a barren desert.

Speaking of the eccentric Da Gatorra, Rhys's dazed psychedelic pop gluttony would seem to find its ideal match precisely in the music of this South American electro-freak, for whom the Welshman holds something close to veneration. The idea of a collaboration is met very favourably by the obscure São Paulo artist, and so, once the Argentine chapter of “Separado!” is wrapped up, Gruff allows himself a brief detour before heading back to the UK.

Recorded in a handful of hours after a few days spent plotting together in São Paulo – their first meeting since the film shoot – The Terror Of Cosmic Loneliness does indeed mirror the chaotic partnership of two musicians separated by an insurmountable language barrier and destined to understand one another solely through music (and the occasional gesture). Unfortunately, the mission can hardly be called a success: the result, well below expectations, amounts to a wretched little electro-punk record – more favela than fairy tale – overflowing with cacophonous junk, oddball experimentalism, hypnotic funk and industrial rhythms.

Living up to that “Vs” emblazoned on the header and cover, the artistic and backgrounds divergences between the two performers far outweigh their few points of contact, shaping a thoroughly discordant trash fresco in which Gruff stands out mostly for his loose, Neil Hagerty-esque electric guitar contributions. Da Gatorra, unfortunately, takes centre stage, a sort of cross between an avant-garde agitator and a vagrant, Alan Vega, Alejandro Jodorowsky and an improbable South American revolutionary hero. His surreal, mystically-tinged, hopelessly dated ethno-hippie tone pollutes a collection with neither head nor tail – its ideal manifesto being “Eu Protesto” – dragging down with it even some of the Welshman's better visionary ideas (“In A House With No Mirrors”, and to a lesser extent the hallucinated, ever-menacing “Oh Warra Hoo!”). As if that weren't enough, the guy rambles on about capitalism and cosmic love while wielding a looming instrument of his own invention – part guitar, part drum machine – somewhat unimaginatively christened the Gatorra (and already flogged, during its fifteen minutes of fame, to the odd minor celebrity, such as Nick McCarthy of Franz Ferdinand).

A love of concept albums only ever bears good fruit

By now it's clear that, whenever he's on leave from his hairy bandmates, Gruff has a soft spot for eccentric projects with a sharply defined artistic identity, perfectly suited to a storyteller of his calibre. Armed with a superb new autobiographical concept, he chooses here, on his third solo record, to recount his privileged vantage point on the unhealthy routine of fleeting moments and relationships that makes up the life of the globe-trotting artist. God only knows how many hotels on five continents have hosted his sleep over more than fifteen years of honourable career, and how many gadgets and trinkets have followed him from those rooms back to Wales. Not all those soaps, shampoos, slippers and shower caps earned the honour of ending up in the bizarre shrine the singer assembled and sold, like so much smoke, to a well-known Cardiff art gallery in a clever bit of promotion – but there's no doubt they truly numbered in their legions.

Beyond the amusing marketing fluff, the Super Furry Animals frontman delivers with Hotel Shampoo (released on Turnstile on Valentine's Day 2011) a genuine refuge for his wandering musician's soul, shaping this shimmering collection of easy listening gems, backed by a genuinely brilliant graphic concept, the kind that would delight any semiologist.

God only knows, as we said. God Only Knows. Indeed. It's no accident that one keeps stumbling into the impossible melodies of those Beach Boys, into the magic of an easy-listening sound that seems capable of reaching absolutely anywhere. “Pet Sounds” has always been far more than a simple record: a genre unto itself, a vision, perhaps even a utopia. Something Gruff must have inhaled while writing this little album, something that glows against the light and draws smiles, the carbon dioxide that greets the fizzy drink and rises triumphantly up your nose. Hotel Shampoo works for a whole host of reasons so trivial they become essential. It delights through alliteration, for instance, boasts a string of fantastic titles, and radiates charisma across the board, like the affable class star you win over with jokes and generously shared homework. The sheer straightforwardness of every tune is dazzling, its golden rosary beads simple and simply adorned. They slip through your fingers one after another, with such brazen nonchalance that it reinforces the impression that nothing in the world could be easier than writing ultra-catchy little songs of the Rhys brand. These two-and-a-half-minute technicolour numbers end up embodying modesty-as-perfection even better than the legendary nil-nil draws of Annibale Frossi: a sublime match, one in which the record simply refuses to leave the player.

The hut full of bottles and little flasks might best be rethought as a metaphor for a phantasmagorical pop laboratory, where one plays endlessly at being a tiny cloning machine, replicating forty-year-old fragrances without dyes or preservatives, and with only a minimal percentage of added additives. What's striking here is the intelligence with which the electronics are placed entirely at the service of the songs, with sparing, never-intrusive touches that fit beautifully with Gruff's effective songwriting and chat amiably with his delightful arrangements. Shifts in catchiness, mischievous smudges applied to distant tex-mex flourishes (“Sensations In The Dark”), subtly garish synthetic touches that heighten the memory of a futuristic 1970s synth-pop sound à-la Rod Argent (“Christopher Columbus”). And then there's that sense of ironic, thoroughly enjoyable fakery that runs through the record from the very first note of “Shark Ridden Waters”, waters infested by inflatable sharks under that very same air-conditioned sun Beck once dreamed of: the ideal stage for reassimilating, with style, distant soft-pop delicacies such as a mouldy cover of Bacharach redone by a trio of obscure Americans, The Cyrkle.

Much less racket than his band's usual standards. The bearded Welshman throws a quiet party in his hotel room, switching without warning between the mask of the ghost of carnivals past and that of the modern indie-popper: charm and horn lines borrowed from Belle & Sebastian (“Take A Sentence”), secondhand dandyism in cahoots with Sarah Assbring aka El Perro del Mar (“Space Dust #2”, essentially Stevie Jackson redoing Bowie with a classmate), a latter-day Ray Davies in full Wilsonian rapture (“Honey All Over”, an eloquent title), a heart-wrenching melody with a clear Zombies pedigree (“Vitamin K”, positively orgasmic) and a revised and corrected take on Neil Hannon's “Promenade” (“At The Heart Of Love”). As a little treat for die-hard fans, there's also a sneaky inclusion of what sounds very much like a Super Furry Animals outtake – the tart, irresistible “Patterns Of Power” – a kind of crossroads between Van Dyke Parks' Californian sunshine and the psychedelic badlands of fellow Welshmen Gorky's Zygotic Mynci. But it's the exception. All it shares with the rest of the album is its place of conception: a hotel bed, however modest. Spared the idiotic wrecking-ball antics of eternal tearaways, and destined solely to provide the backdrop for one's own dreams.

Since the habit is clearly established, after indulging himself by composing the soundtrack for a video game ("Whale Trail"), Gruff once again hits the mark teaming up with Boom Bip, exactly five years after their first outing, with yet another concept album, this time dedicated to the controversial figure of the communist patron and Italian publisher Giangiacomo Feltrinelli. Leaving behind the hip-hop excursions of the debut album, Praxis Makes Perfect opts for a more sober and sophisticated form, using euro and italo-dance merely as a pretext to gatecrash the lavish poolside parties of the stars-and-stripes jet set between the Seventies and Eighties, made of cocktails, delicacies and — why not — Steely Dan.

As one might guess, the interplay between the chosen style and the subject matter is inevitably jarring, yet it marks an important point in terms of originality. Just as Feltrinelli remains a controversial figure full of paradoxes, Neon Neon give voice to these contradictions with lyrics and melodies that are deliberately at odds with one another, starting with the single, the syncopated wave-dance track "Mid-Century Modern Nightmare", in which Giangiacomo is played by none other than Asia Argento, who announces: "This is Radio GAP — Gruppi di Azione Partigiana" (the paramilitary group led and funded by Feltrinelli), certainly a rather too festive anthem for a terrorist cell.

And that's not to mention the mockery of capitalism sung by Sabrina Salerno in "Shopping (I Like To)": Giangiacomo probably wouldn't have been quite so sarcastic, but there's nothing better than a bit of self-deprecating irony, framed by winking references to 1987, the year of Sabrina's own smash hits and of Pet Shop Boys' euro-disco outing "Actually" — an album which, as it happens, contains a track with the very same title.

A cover that nods to the ones Peter Saville designed for OMD, a sound that makes style its defining trait, and a singular, dead-serious story played out entirely on a tightrope of humour. The record is extremely short, but it strings together a series of pop gems favoring quality over quantity, as is always the case with this Anglo-American duo. Worth singling out is certainly "Hoops With Fidel", a little gem somewhere between Joe Jackson and Alan Parsons Project which, amid shifting rhythms and heavenly atmospheres, imagines Giangiacomo in Cuba relaxing by playing basketball with Fidel Castro.

"Doctor Zhivago", on the other hand, a track that could have been a hit worthy of Tears For Fears in the Eighties, tells of the political difficulties Feltrinelli faced in publishing Pasternak's masterpiece, opposed by every possible means by Soviet Union officials. Neon Neon clearly did their homework on the monumental biography dedicated to Feltrinelli ("Senior Service", written by his son), turning Praxis Makes Perfect into a pop album that also doubles, a little, as a historical crib sheet. "The Leopard", "Listen To the Rainbow" and "Ciao Feltrinelli" close things out on more nostalgic, delicate tones ("a bit like a watered-down Gloria Estefan", as Rhys puts it in an interview), but no less enchanting for it.

Legendary past and future apocalypses

Only a year goes by. True to his knack for unforeseen turns and his pathological aversion to any principle of linearity, in 2014 our man raises the stakes with a creative effort that, given the sheer grandeur of the project as a whole, it would be reductive to simply call ambitious.

The object of his proverbial mania for storytelling this time around is the saga of the explorer and cartographer John Evans, Gruff's presumed ancestor, who in the eighteenth century searched in vain along the course of the Missouri River for traces of a fabled tribe descended from the Welsh prince Madoc (who, according to legend, would have reached American soil more than three centuries before Christopher Columbus), embarking on an incredible journey on foot through the wilderness (a sort of "Into The Wild" ante litteram) and offering — with hindsight — a precious contribution to the successful Lewis and Clark expedition to the Pacific.

Two years earlier Rhys undertook a sort of themed pilgrimage, complete with a series of concerts in the very same places, PowerPoint presentation and puppet of his ancestor included (an investigative concert tour), and from the experience of this "double odyssey" he then produced a documentary, a book (described as a psychedelic historical travelogue, in effect his second travel diary after the Argentine excursion of "Separado!"), an app (!) and of course a proper album, American Interior: a record that holds up solidly even aside from its pioneering spirit and the narrative thread running through its tracks, a work that is, as ever, bold and entertaining, with anything-but-trivial reflections on the margins about the sense of identity, both individual and national, about the mystification of those who shape a myth purely for political gain, and about the blurred lines that often separate history from legend.

A huge amount to unpack, then, and the usual overtime for the reviewer tasked with giving it a suitably wide-ranging treatment. But once the weighty conceptual preamble is set aside, what remains is to account for the purely musical side of things — an area where perspectives will necessarily be simplified by the sheer limits of such a recognizable character, despite (and thanks to) a creative omnivorousness as fervent as it is rare. That the starting point is the same sophisticated, viscous pop of the Hotel Shampoo maestro is suggested by the title track, with its wistful Electric Light Orchestra echoes, extraordinary softness of touch, blazing guitar work and harmonious string flourishes — an impression reaffirmed repeatedly by a delivery that always leans toward velvet (witness, in "Liberty", the apotheosis of all that glittering golden-age crooning, the kind associated with soft-focus boozy hazes, shimmering sequins and Spectorisms in abundance). Even clearer still is that other highly typical number titled "The Last Conquistador", whose setting pulls forcefully back toward the late Seventies, while seductive piano lines and muted chattering flourishes furnish the scene, though no less delightful is the sly, dazzling "The Swamp", with its little keyboard line pinched from Grandaddy and a genuine gem of a chorus.

The electronics gently counterfeit a new roster of frivolous yet relentless little songs, built on harmonic flourishes, lethal falsetto refrains and the usual inclination toward gaudiness — flashy but classy, with "The Whether (Or Not)" as the paradigm case. Affected yet nonetheless intelligent, Rhys once again proves himself an artist who loves to catch listeners off guard through the most unexpected short-circuits, contradictory crossings of high and low, noble and base (a detail borne out by the cheap-sounding effects lining pretty much every track), and has always delighted in crafting grandly conceived kitsch miniatures: intriguing, well-engineered, eccentric and deeply rooted in a vividly retrofuturist dimension, for the way they combine tireless revivalism with a sensibility, a taste for experimentation and cross-pollination, that couldn't feel more current: if Fleetwood Mac meeting the synth-wave vintage of Neon Neon on "Lost Tribes" is emblematic, by the same logic "Iolo" is no less remarkable, a kind of symphonic spaghetti-western in which Gruff cannibalizes the obsessive autism of his American counterpart Wayne Coyne, improving on it, admirably folding it into the framework of a full-blown orchestration.

Curiously, the frontman of Flaming Lips gets a passing mention regarding an album that registers an undeniable dose of madness and muscle behind the drums, thanks precisely to the (recently ousted) drummer of the Oklahoma band, Kliph Scurlock. His contribution proves decisive, as evidenced by the charging rhythms of "100 Unread Messages", openly at odds with the infectious rockabilly-flavored populism the track flaunts. The result, in this case, is an irresistible mess, a bizarre crossbreed of traditional and blatant easy-listening, put together with brazen authenticity, at times retreading the same Americana exploration already mapped out back in the delightful "Love Kraft".

Once again the diorama effect is extremely strong, and clearly deliberate at that. Rhys builds the context with an almost obsessive precision, but it's then the characteristic goliardic streak of Super Furry Animals that gives away the fictional nature of these dazzling contrivances, lending them a breath of real life — a knowing, unacademic antidote to the risks of mannerism. The high point, in this sense, comes with "Allweddellau Allweddol", which pushes openly toward tribalism, ethno-pop propulsion, battle-ready exoticism à la M.I.A., with just a touch of Welsh weirdness thrown in, Gorky's Zygotic Mynci-style (though one could just as easily cite the old "Mwng", to stay on theme).

In the closing stretch, on slower-paced numbers (which he always pulls off splendidly), the singer moves as if on autopilot. Even so, his preciousness remains free of any connotation that doesn't fall squarely under the adjective "exhilarating", and indeed offers the listener a more relaxed view of his seasoned showmanship, between tricks revealed in slow motion during the singalong and renewed traditionalist languor in a finale that feels like a slow country fade-out.

How "American Interior" would sound if Gruff hadn't ended up getting too caught up in it, inevitably postponing his band's return (absent since 2009), we'll never know. What we do know, however, is how he sounds even without the other super-furry animals. Well, as a consolation prize, it's worth acknowledging that it's not bad at all.

As usual, the two years that follow are pretty intense and see the Welshman move in every direction at once. Between 2015 and 2016 Gruff dusts off the old Candylion, revisited with some additions for an interactive show, "The Insatiable, Inflatable Candylion", halfway between a concert and theatre, co-produced by the National Theatre Wales. Within a few months he also releases the soundtrack (somewhere between folk and jazz) for the biopic "Set Fire To The Stars", starring Elijah Wood among others and centred on the figure of the poet (and national hero) Dylan Thomas, as well as the one-off single "I Love EU", in support of the Remain campaign for the consultative referendum of 23 June 2016 on the UK's membership of the European Union.

In that respect, it seems unlikely that for an artist as generously engaged on the front lines as Rhys, the shadow of Brexit had no bearing at all on an album so branded by distrust as the following Babelsberg, a concept record about a post-apocalyptic Wales that oozes disenchantment, affliction and bitterness toward the future, yet conceals it all behind the usual pop camouflage, if anything pushing that adulteration to its most extreme consequences.

Back under the wing of Rough Trade after about a decade, Rhys wanted to go big, enriching the new ballads with grandiose orchestration and drawing on a particularly evocative heading, jotted down during the 2014 North American tour, which proved invaluable during the disheartened phase in which the record was born, when he was searching for a title that could evoke the vertigo of a modern Tower of Babel – between collective hysteria and biblical-plague allegories – duly counterbalanced by rare flashes of ironic grace and a subtle streak of hope.

Recorded in three days by Gruff and his trusty drummer Kliph Scurlock in early 2016, alongside producer Ali Chant and multi-instrumentalists Osian Gwynedd and Stephen Black, the collection then had to wait roughly eighteen months to be completed with the contributions the author had in mind to temper its more cynical impulses: those of composer Stephen McNeff and the seventy-two musicians of the BBC National Orchestra of Wales. Musically lush and eclectic, the result pays more than one tribute, in its grooves, to Scott Walker, Lee Hazelwood, Harry Nilsson and Jimmy Webb. And that's clear from the opening track, where the airy vistas sketched out by strings and choirs suggest the scenic grandeur of a work that plays masterfully with scale, without ever becoming excessive, overblown or theatrical. That sophisticated stamp suits a brilliant performer like the Welshman well, adept at making the most of the elegance and polish of the instrumental side without ever fully silencing an innate pull toward weirdness and psychedelia.

Gruff's baritone crooning grows even more shadowy, but the symphonic accompaniments offset its lows, helping to trigger some formidable short-circuits on listening. The ups and downs the artist puts the listener through convey the emotional vitality of a work entirely animated by these intense light-and-shade contrasts, caught between bright hopes of redemption and the comforting lure of despair. From "Oh Dear!" to a frenetic "The Club", which never abandons its convincingly melancholy inflection but also never indulges in affected or defeatist poses, the rhythms stay lively and the mood fizzy, never too far from the warm, comforting feel of Belle & Sebastian, whom he resembles in his almost cinematic sensibility, his brass-band joviality and the pastel shades provided by the horns.

Languid like a Ray Davies in full Tin Pan Alley sophistication ("Take That Call", which recycles the super-hairy animals of "Ohio Heat"), even grandiloquent when a vocal pretending to be deadpan is galvanised by fairy-tale architecture ("Drones In The City"), impressionistic until the pyrotechnic killer refrains say otherwise ("Architecture Of Amnesia"), the storyteller with the "limited-edition heart" occasionally recovers the exquisite craft and precious handmade touches of his chamber indie-pop: confidential, affable and delicate, without ever tipping into mawkishness, romantic to the core yet shielded by that scatterbrained humour which takes the edge off his words. In the closing stretch this exercise in concealment edges toward the sublime, especially when a delightful ballad ("Negative Vibes") garlands another pocket-sized abyss and Rhys allows himself one of his trademark saccharine flourishes, with unmatched grace. The visionary mockery of "Selfies In The Sunset", with its coy touch of striking one last smiling pose before the dazzling glare of nuclear holocaust, makes for a fitting close to this ideal soundtrack for the end of the world.

With the following album Pang! Gruff Rhys has fun shuffling the deck with a project built around a chamber-folk structure that's unusually ethnic in flavour. N'Famady Kouyaté, Muzi, Gavin Fitzjohn, Kliph Scurlock and Gruff Rhys swap out the grandeur of the orchestra from the previous album Babelsberg for an unusual chamber ensemble. Pang! is without doubt the most atypical record in the musician's catalogue, a mix of folk-pop, African music and bossa nova made even more eccentric by the deliberately fragmentary nature of the compositions.

Thirty minutes of healthy eclecticism that perhaps doesn't leave as deep a mark as other works by the Welshman, and one that shows traces of Gruff Rhys's collaboration on Damon Albarn's Africa Express project "Egoli" (2019).

With Seeking New Gods the gruff Rhys returns to the fray with yet another concept album: a biography of Mount Paektu, the volcano? His mischievous spirit and delightful melodic swooniness are put to the service of a refined, handcrafted touch that, with every listen, keeps the charm of the nine tracks intact, revealing after repeated spins an artistic effervescence more typical of a debut act.

The solitary allure of mountains and volcanoes is conveyed through melodies as enveloping as fog ("Can't Carry On"), lively surf-pop steeped in synths and melancholy ("Loan Your Loneliness"), post-punk nods (XTC in "The Seek"), raw garage-pop with psychedelic and glam touches ("Hiking In Lightning"), and kaleidoscopic pop mini-operas worthy of the finest Kinks ("Mausoleum of My Former Self").

While still not giving up a touch of disenchantment, Gruff Rhys's vocal performances are even richer in nuance and detail, especially when pianist Osian Gwynedd's confident, talented playing takes centre stage.

Both the punchier, more pop-leaning creations and, naturally, the more melodic ballads benefit from this, starting with the title track, and especially the superb "Distant Snowy Peaks", one of the most intense and memorable melodies Gruff Rhys has ever written, a song that sounds as if it could have come from the pen of Randy Newman, and which also doesn't shy away from a slight classical quotation (perhaps Grieg) – a perfect closing note for one of the most inspired albums by the brilliant Welshman.

Giving fresh impetus to his creative streak is the composition of the soundtrack for "The Almond And The Sea", an independent drama film – the second soundtrack, after the little-known one for "Set Fire To The Stars" seven years earlier, for the Welsh musician, proof of an unpredictable and visionary flair.

The incipit, with cello drawn from Bach, might suggest a purely instrumental work, but throughout The Almond And The Seahorse (2023) actual songs abound (making up almost half of the twenty-three tracks), settling into an art-pop sound dominated by keyboard instruments, with piano and synth intertwining in minimal swirls ("The Brain And The Body", where dialogue from the film is used as spoken word), riding the wave of Brian Eno the pop auteur, with the oblique, vaguely Eastern-tinged suggestions of "People Are Pissed" pitched at the level of "Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy)".

Rhys taps into playful registers in the "toy-like" synth-pop sound of "Layer Upon Layer" and lively ones in the jazzy uptempo folk of "Sunshine And Laughter Ever After", stirring up, even without direct references, a nostalgia for SFA, alternating them with lyrical flashes à la Peter Gabriel (the melancholy choirs of "Orea"), before hamming it up like a sardonic dandy in the elegant chamber-pop of "I Want My Old Life Back", though he reaches his peak with the track chosen as lead single, "Amen": a hushed start with piano and voice holding back emotion, before exploding into a refrain worthy of the melodic masterpieces of early Elton John, immediately dissolving into Brian Wilson-like softness – one of this year's songs to remember in the pop sphere, a pinnacle of romanticism knowingly undercut by the ironic non-love-song "Liberate Me From The Love Songs", worthy of the deft pen of Stephin Merritt.

If Rhys's inspiration, long since elevated to the aristocracy of British pop, shines in song format, in his instrumental compositions it comes and goes: discreet, classically-tinged shorter interludes are at times touching, as with the diaphanous light filtering through the acoustic filigree of "Library To Kiss", while elsewhere one risks being overwhelmed by the closing flares and drowning in the ambient amniotic fluid of the overly extended closing tracks (preceding another version of "Amen"), a venial sin that undermines a work made partly excessive and grandiloquent, which with greater restraint might have aspired to the heights of the Welshman's solo output.

A small room, a light cast by a television showing static on the screen, and a man seen from behind, absorbed, almost captured by that bluish glow.

The cover of Sadness Sets Me Free (2024) already says it all: the man pictured, Gruff Rhys, is in a pensive mood.

This image is a kind of preamble accompanying the solo return of the eclectic former frontman of Super Furry Animals and Neon Neon, now arriving at his twenty-fifth release since the start of a career spanning 35 years.

In his recent past, the Welsh bard has shown he can turn any story into a potential concept for his albums, from Mount Paektu, the volcano on the border between China and Korea, on Seeking New Gods, to the turbulent lives of John DeLorean on "Stainless Style" and Gianluigi Feltrinelli on "Praxis Makes Perfect".

On "Sadness Sets Me Free", lacking such a tangible subject, the focus of the narrative becomes his own dejected state of mind, due partly to the exhaustion of his last tour and partly to his distrust of the political class, the effects of Brexit, and the evanescence of prevailing values.

Recorded in just three days at La Frette Studios, housed in a 19th-century villa near Paris, "Sadness Sets Me Free" is clearly steeped in melancholy and pessimism, but it would be wrong to think of it as the anguished soliloquy of a depressed artist: here we're dealing with a compositional juggler armed with irony, talent, and no small amount of experience.

So even though the sounds are more rarefied than usual, the framework remains solid and always geared toward a sophisticated, lush and very classic brand of pop, underpinned by layered orchestral arrangements that are rich and well measured.

Indeed, the chamber pop of "Celestial Candyfloss" stands out, which Gruff himself describes as "an attempt at a pocket symphony about the cosmic distances people will travel in search of love and acceptance".

From the Brian Wilson-esque falsetto of "Celestial Candyfloss", Gruff Rhys's voice shifts between crooner depths on "Bad Friend", a hymn to tolerant friendship that must hold up even when it's raining, the beer is warm and the chips are soggy, and intimate Bacharach-like moments on the elegant "Silver Lining (Lead Balloons)". The strength of the band, now consolidated with former Flaming Lips drummer Kliph Scurlock, Osian Gwynedd on piano and backing vocalist Kate Stables, allows for tropical excursions on "They Sold My Home To Build A Skyscraper", or for delving into the chiaroscuro of "On the Far Side Of The Dollar" before rising amid interweaving violins and horns in the crescendo of "Peace Signs".

Even though the tone remains fairly muted throughout "Sadness Sets Me Free", Gruff, also known for his pro-European stance, doesn't hold back from touching raw nerves, with the utopian temptation to replace the entire leadership class on the soft yet combative "Cover Up The Cover Up". Never repetitive, the former frontman of Super Furry Animals shows off all his versatility, with the pedal-steel-tinged country of the opening track "Sadness Sets Me Free", whose title line returns at the end of the psychedelic lullaby that closes the circle of an album made quickly but with real impact.

Even though it lacks a super-hit along the lines of "Demons", and this classic form sacrifices experimentation and the daring to step outside convention, Rhys proves he hasn't lost his magic touch or melodic appeal — if anything, with time he seems to have sharpened his aim, delivering a top-tier album with no dip in tension.

He thus manages to wed his natural eccentricity and his theatrical irony with the maturity of someone who knows how to free sadness from the wearisome chains of heaviness.

The Welsh musician continues his introspective, melancholy phase with Dim Probs (2025), an album that favours dark lo-fi logic and arcane folk harmonies: Rhys colours them with naive electronic textures and forgoes English to sing in his native tongue, Welsh. His new record is a celebration of sobriety and simplicity. A collection of songs devoid of the lively pop hooks of its predecessor, largely written with the help of a guitar bought cheaply from an online catalogue. For Gruff, the lo-fi technique isn't a limitation but rather an opportunity to explore new solutions, while the lyrics remain, as ever, steeped in grotesque and bitter reflections on decidedly weighty themes such as death, war and plague.

The album flows elegantly through unusual blends of samba and country ("Saf Ar Dy Sedd") and childlike yet reflective folk-pop ballads complete with analogue synths and toy drum machines ("Cân I'r Cymylau"). But beware letting your guard down: nothing is quite as it seems on "Dim Probs". Cate Le Bon and H. Hawkline are the masters of ceremony on the poetic and unusual, mournful and bucolic folk song that opens the album, "Pan Ddaw'r Haul I Fore", but they're also the stars of the acrobatic single "Chwyn Chwyldroadol!", which stakes a claim as the most endearing and entertaining track on the record.

The album’s title isn’t purely Welsh, it’s a slang expression that roughly translates as “no worries”. Ironically enough, these are Gruff Rhys’s most problematic and shadowy songs. Aching poems steeped in saudade, with arpeggios in the style of Joni Mitchell (“Dos Amdani”, “Cyflafan”). But unpredictability is always lurking just around the corner: on “Taro #1 + #2” the musician indulges in a foray into yacht-rock, complete with a summery groove and a wonky sax that once again underline his sheer uniqueness.

Contributions by Marco Bercella and Veronica Rosi (“Praxis Makes Perfect”), Gianfranco Marmoro (“Pang”, “Seeking New Gods”, “Dim Probs”), Giuseppe Rapisarda (“The Almond And The Seahorse”), Lorenzo Montefreddo (“Sadness Sets Me Free”)

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