Despite having started her career as a solo singer as early as 2002, the Welsh artist Gwenno [Saunders] began to become prominent in the late 2000s as a singer/keyboardist of the British Indie Pop group The Pipettes. The band got to release two full-length albums: We Are The Pipettes (2006) and Earth vs. The Pipettes (2010), whose music harked to the upbeat, cutesy, and sunny sensibilities of the late ’50s to early ’60s popular female-oriented Pop groups such as The Chordettes (“Mr. Sandman”), The Ronettes (“Be My Baby”), The Dixie Cups (“Chapel of Love”), and The Shangri-Las (“Remember [Walkin’ in the Sand]). In the advent of the 2010s, Gwenno began collaborating with other artists whom included the Australian Electronic Dance Music duo Pnau, the English Indie Pop duo The Boy Least Likely To, and Elton John. Soon she embarked on focusing again on her own music, releasing in 2012, the Welsh-language EP Ymbelydredd; and finally, a full solo album in 2014.
In July 2015, Gwenno re-released her first full-length solo album, entitled Y Dydd Olaf (which translates to “The Last Day”), on Heavenly Recordings. While it no longer carries the catchy, cheer-type style of The Pipettes, Gwenno’s latest offering dwells more on the soft and sparse soundscape of Synthpop music—less organic and less playful yet more mature in musical approach and serious in terms of delivery and lyrical content. Her subject matter, obviously alluding to the themes of the novel from which the album title was derived, included “patriarchal society, government-funded media propaganda, cultural control, and importance of and threat to minority languages.” More so, a good number of songs exuded sonic scents of Welsh Folk music, an obvious and inevitable introspection into her cultural roots. Gwenno was born in Cardiff, Wales, to a notable poet-linguist father and a mother who was a member of a choir and who has worked as a translator. Thus, her fluency in Welsh, Cornish, and English should not come as a surprise.
Named after the 1976 Science Fiction novel about “robots taking over humanity and turning humans into clones,” by the Welsh author Owain Owain, Y Dydd Olaf consists of ten songs: nine in Welsh and one in Cornish. It opens with the sexy and loungy “Chwyldro” [‘Revolution’], which has a spacey-sounding piano-led intro. This mood carries on to “Patriarchaeth” [‘Patriarchy’], albeit the pace of this song becomes a bit faster as it launches into the verses, owing to the funky synth bassline and metronomic keyboard pulses.
Reminiscent of the so-called Krautrock style of Kraftwerk, “Calon Peiriant” [‘Heart Machine’] has a driving, marching rhythm and a circular, arpeggiated keyboard pattern that give the song a sinister robotic sound. “Sisial Y Môr” [‘Whispering Sea’] is a hypnotic downtempo track that will not be out of place in the Trip-Hop territory of the likes of Portishead (“Sour Times”), Massive Attack (“Teardrop”), and Moby (“Porcelain”). Following is “Dawns Y Blaned Dirion” [‘Dance of the Kindly Planet’], a short ambient instrumental that effectively serves as a prelude to the next equally Trip-Hop-like “Golau Arall” [‘Another Light’].
The highlight of the album in terms of melodic catchiness is “Stwff” [‘Stuff’], a dancey affair made up of a mélange of vibraphone, keyboard lines, and accessible vocal melodies that ends in a carnival-sounding coda. In this song, the keen-eared may hear traces of The Postal Service (“We Will Become Silhouettes”), Gorillaz (“On Melancholy Hill”), and the Adam Schlesinger–penned “Way Back into Love” from the 2007 movie Music & Lyrics. This engaging atmosphere flows smoothly into the similarly upbeat title track and the ensuing mirrorball-worthy “Fratolish Hiang Perpeshki,” which vaguely exudes an early Depeche Mode musicality. Finally, the album closes with the organ-drenched Psychedelic Folk of the Cornish-worded song, “Amser” [‘Time’].
Although the lyrics of all its songs are not in English, Y Dydd Olaf can still be both a trip to familiar grounds and an exciting expedition into a different dimension. The typical tunefulness and graceful groove of the songs as well as Gwenno’s willingness to explore the opposite of mainstream music are the album’s badge of honor. For this, CrypticRock gives this album 4 out of 5 stars.
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