Album Review: Pang! by Gruff Rhys

'Pang' is generally a negative word, a brief but intense shot of feeling associated with regret, jealousy or a deficiency of something. Gruff Rhys, on the evidence of his sixth solo album, is looking to turn it into a positive. If anything the pangs here are to be felt in society and politics, of which more later. First the music, which is written by Rhys and sung in Welsh, with 'a couple of verses in Zulu and an English title', as the press release states.

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Consider Pang! the aperitif to the luxurious meal that was Babelsberg, the 2018 concept album recorded with the BBC National Orchestra of Wales. Gliding by on elegant electronic rhythms, sung in Welsh and buoyed by breezy chord changes reminiscent of bossa nova and fingerpicked folk, Pang! finds Gruff Rhys collaborating with Muzi, an electronic artist from South Africa. It's not the only 2019 album to find Rhys delving into modern African music.

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Gruff Rhys has always been an artist with an international mind. Despite allowing his own inherent Welshness to shine throughout a music career now spanning over thirty years, there has always been a sense that Gruff prefers to apply his mother tongue outwardly, as opposed to the trend of many Welsh-language musicians to - understandably - focus inwardly, towards an audience who understand the lyrics. Perhaps his multicultural mind-set was born from the childhood memory of being enamoured by Rene Griffiths, an Argentinian 'gaucho' singer-songwriter from Patagonia who sung in Welsh on television in the 70s, inspiring Gruff's 2010 documentary Separado! And it was during his South American travels that he discovered Brazilian TV repairman, Tony Da Gatorra, an eccentric musician who Gruff teamed up with to record mind-bending psychedelic album, The Terror of Cosmic Loneliness, without a single shared language.

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A fter last year's expansive, magnificent Babelsberg, Gruff Rhys has pared things back, although not by much. Where Babelsburg went the full orchestra, Pang! confines itself to the chamber, its songs not draped in instrumentation, but coloured with brass and woodwind where necessary, to supplement the pastoral acoustic mood of the album. There is, though, another form of expansiveness: for all its grounding in very British folk-rock styles, Pang! is a global record - there's an explicit influence from South Africa (it was produced by the South African electronica artist Muzi) with some lyrics sung in Zulu, and in some of the instrumental detailing - the jittering electronic bells of Ara Deg, the interplay of guitar and percussion on Bae Bae Bae.

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