A sometimes baffling and beguiling record that steadfastly fails to bobulate, Hen Ogledd remain like no other.

OLD LAWS AND OLD RELIGIONS

The Old North. that’s the meaning of band name, Hen Ogledd, or, more specifically, the Brythonic speaking area of Northern England, including much of Wales, and southern Scotland, in the Middle Ages. It smacks of old laws and old religions, which I guess is the aim, even if the musical palette is strictly, if not 21st century, certainly the century before. This is their fourth album, fifth, if you include the eponymous album that earlier came from two of the now four members. The four members each derive from separate tribes and kingdoms of that Hen Ogledd: Dawn Bothwell, Rhodri Davies, Richard Dawson and Sally Pilkington, and it is six years since the last, which has since seen them move to record label, Domino.

Dawson will be the best known, through his idiosyncratic brand of prog-folk wyrdness, but his cohorts have each built names for themselves, all well outside the mainstream. Davies is an improvisational player of the Welsh triple harp, specialising in special treatments and applications to alter the sound, whereas Bothwell and Pilkington are each multi-instrumentalists with similar backgrounds in improv and experimental music. The band would file their collective works under ‘pop’, but the album title adds an adjective many listeners might use to describe such pop.

PLUNGED INTO A CEREMONY

It opens with Nell’s Prologue, with the presumptive Nell, the voice of a young child, intoning a narrative drawn from a Hammer film idea of the countryside, if already through a Lynchian lens. Keys hover and strings thwack. The listener remains, broadly, none the wiser, and certainly not expecting what follows. A few random notes, a drumbeat and, to a barrage of horns, we are suddenly plunged into the middle of a ceremony. A sharply delivered sprechgesang recites the detail; this is Bothwell and she calls this “bard rap”.

A list of unfeasibly related topics, it conjoins meditations on political tumult, personal crisis and mental wellbeing, with references both to Greenham Common and the Durham Miners Gala. Choruses follow almost hymnally, all four voices chanting: “Scales will fall , the violence will start“, or at least I think that’s what they say. It is chaotically wondrous, not least as it breaks into freeform skronks of sax and trumpet, squawking over the same processional majesty. The massed horns and vocal incantations return for a triumphant finale, before it closes, the studio then picking up on the glee this performance has given them: “Too much fun, Sally!“

NO SIGNS OF BOBULATION

A warped dance-floor beat, heavy on bass, percussion and treated harp, beckons in the bilingual Dead In A Post-Truth World, the lyrics jumping between Welsh and English, song and occasional speech. Squint and it’s a surprisingly commercial confection. Abba is a name they drop in interview, and, had the Swedes trod a different path, it isn’t impossible to imagine, if similarly far from any overt semblance. As you drag yourself from the propulsive beat, the words reveal the Hen Ogledd position in and on the world we inhabit and they are not happy.

Barely a break, the tracks segued together by machinery, we are now in a chapel, somewhere in the mountains, in the middle of an electronic storm of distorting sound. An organ peals, voices sing and a saxophone gently honks, as the mayhem filters through from an alternate universe. A disembodied Tuvan throat/voice intermittently growls “Disco“. There are no signs of bobulation any time yet or anticipated any time soon.

BAPTISM INTO ACTS LONG FORGOTTEN

End Of The Rhythm is a track that begins and continues with endlessly pounding drums, a song that bounces along on a bed of discordant harp and vocals. Never fully audible enough for the certainty of coherence, there seems to be mention of rainbows, or rivers, and their end, but, again, this could be conjecture or hope. The background vocals, behind Bothwell’s insistent instruction, swap between the quasi-religious and kindergarten cacophony. The more you listen, so the more the experience draws you in, an immersion akin to baptism into acts long forgotten. The saxophone hasn’t gone away, and you find yourself oddly grateful for that.

The round robin acapella of Amser A Ddengys repeats a single line for a minute. Is this to imply a pause or just to to further imprint the sense of unease, an unease that is becoming slowly self-soothing. But that moment disintegrates into a tumble of drums, for Clear Pools, over which woodwinds begin to set up shop. Bar the opener and the track before this, none of these songs are short, but this cascades over into almost 15 minutes of perpetually morphing soundscape. Gongs gong, guitar and harp strings are plucked, once the drums subside, and a piano tinkles out a few notes of melody. It becomes close to conventional song, folk song at that, with a female voice sweeping and soaring weightlessly, then two: “Gravity has gone from here“.

DELICIOUSLY ECCENTRIC

Is this the eye in their storm? It is certainly beguiling enough to have you forget some of the choppier sounds before it, a mantra of and for hope. It’s lovely, right down to the close, with yet another disembodied voice in recitation, language uncertain and some now more structured saxophony. The album then closes with shore sounds, waves breaking, ending abruptly for piano and what sounds like a language class to break in, with a male voice speaking, and grouped voices repeating back to him. Education or indoctrination, I don’t know, but it bookends this deliciously eccentric album as vexingly as it all starts.

WTF?

WTF would be a reasonable first impression to the record, possibly also to my writing about it, where the W is both what and why. But it seeps in tendrils that keep drawing you back, trying to make the head from the tail of it. Find the time to make friends with it. The 4 members and the umpteen collaborators here have put much more thought into it than first seems apparent, it only fair to grant them that privilege. Beyond the front names, I would also give a special mention to the drumming of Will Guthrie, and the saxophone calisthenics of Fay Calman.

(There, and I hesitate to mention this, seemed also a spell cast on my copy, as, once I got to Clear Pools, this was a track that I could neither fast forward nor, seemingly, end, it conspiring to loop continuously. This I still don’t fully understand……. Oo-ee-oo.)

Embrace the oddness, with Scales Will Fall:

Hen Ogledd: Website

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