Album review: Y Niwl – s/t
For someone who doesn’t particularly dig instrumental music, having two intrumental CDs to review in the space of a week could be considered unlucky. Fortunately the first, by Talons, turned out to be pretty good, but can I be lucky twice in a row?
Y Niwl (pronounced ‘Uh Nule’) are a surf rock band hailing from Wales. An odd choice of muscial genre for a band who live nowhere near the sea and in a climate more suited to penguins? Maybe, but it’s what the four members grew up listening to, and besides if you’re a surf rock band you don’t need to write lyrics. Lazy bastards.
Influenced by the likes of Dick Dale, Joe Meek and The Shadows and Little Richard, Y Niwl play a concoction of surf and garage rock and with a bit of punk attitude thrown in. Their ten track self-titled debut features song titles that are all numbers in Welsh, though I’m reliably informed they don’t actually run in numerical order. Being a surf rock album it’s all about the riffs and ‘Y Niwl’ is loaded with some absolute crackers, especially on ‘Wyth’ and ‘Undegpump’ which are my favourite tracks. However to show they’re not a one trick pony not all the songs are surf influenced; ‘Deg’ for instance, with its excellent Hammond organs, could easily be the soundtrack for a sixties film like ‘Blow Up’, while closing track ‘Undegtri’ is a much more restrained affair that conjures up images of autumn leaves rather than white horses.
I really like all the ten tracks that make up ‘Y Niwl’ so I’m reluctant to criticise it, but I found my mind wandering off at around track 6. At just under 30 minutes it is quite a short album and its brevity certainly works in its favour, but I think you’d get a lot more out of it listening to it in two halves. 7/10
Mark Cousens
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