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Features Disc of the day
The Lowland Hundred
Under Cambrian Sky
(Victory Garden)
Off-the-grid 2010 conceptual debut about a mythic Welsh kingdom sends MOJO Deputy Ed into melancholy reverie.
It begins, softly, on a slow stirring incline, just piano and mournful Robert Wyatt lament, singing what might at first appears to be a simple love song about a couple who always "pass but never touch". On closer listen, the song also reveals itself as a bowed-down Blue Nile esque ballad concerning the creaking funicular rail cars that work the slope on the Aberystwyth Cliff Railway - "One rises/the second rolls the other way/Over the years things haven't changed that much." This is the opening, scene-setting act of ghostly mesmerism on Tim Noble and Paul Newland's debut album as The Lowland Hundred.
Naming themselves after (the English translation of) Cantre'r Gwaelod, the mythical lost kingdom said to lie beneath the waters of Cardigan Bay, these two recent Aberystwyth residents have embraced the Victorian architecture, Cambrian wilderness and strange history of their surroundings to deliver a debut album of startling ambition and ghostly power.
Like all truly great albums, Under Cambrian Sky is constructed as a journey, one that moves from the seaside melancholy of the present day into the groaning depths of Wales' mythic past. Track two, Camera Obscura, finds us on the peak of Aberystwyth's Constitution Hill, using one of the town's main tourist attractions as a lyrical device for travelling into the past, signalled by the subsequent montage of bird song, creaking metal and running water, The Bruised Hill. Track four, Picot, finds us back in the Victorian town - Paul Newland's sad, lonesome voice finding transformative beauty in the windows of Prospect Street and Vulcan Street, and picot doilies and cotton reels washed up by the sea. However, as the album unravels, history intrudes in less pleasant ways. Allt-Glais, set in the chattering ancient wood outside the town, where the court of King Gwyddno Garantir reputedly fled following the flood, is Meddle-era Pink Floyd by way of Walter De La Mare, while The Air Loom is a twelve-minute epic set inside the gibbering mind of 18th Century Welsh tea-trader, James Tilly Matthews, whose schizophrenic torments are sound-tracked by a musique concrete of ringing bells, winding clocks, shuffling paper, short-wave radio chatter and a sinister Dreaming-like recital of Matthews' imagined torments ("Fluid Locking/Lobster Cracking/Stone Making/Thigh Talking/Bomb Bursting...") and tormenters ("Bill The King/Jack The Schoolmaster/Sir Archy/Glove Woman...). The album ends with the plaintive, Bill Fay-esque Anemone, a track of deep, sorrowful beauty which finds our traveler floating past "Dolphin bottle head/Shallow mussel bed/Half moon jellyfish", towards, either, the buried kingdom of The Lowland Hundred or a blissful underwater expiration.
It's so rare that an album this singular arrives without press fanfare but Under Cambrian Sky really is unique, like Robert Wyatt's Rock Bottom imbued with the mystic Welsh spirit of Arthur Machen. And still, after all these listens, it continues to beguile.
Ross Bennett
Posted by Ross_Bennett at 6:00 AM GMT 12/01/2011
Further Listening
Robert Wyatt – Rock Bottom (Virgin, 1974)
Bill Fay – Bill Fay (Deram, 1970)
Blue Nile – Hats (Linn, 1989)
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Wow, I had never heard of either The Lowland Hundred or this album, but it is great. Thanks Mojo. Just when I was about to give up hope of seeing more great Discs of the Day, you have come through in the last week.
Cheers
Posted by Bokonon at 6:24 PM GMT 12/01/2011 Report Abuse
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'tis indeed truly brilliant.
Posted by Daniel Figgis at 12:25 PM GMT 04/12/2011 Report Abuse
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