Gruff Rhys: Pang! review acoustic, pastoral, global ... and as unpredictable as ever

‘Remember to wear a cap and spectacles’ ... Gruff Rhys

After 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 colored 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

Overshadowing all of this, though, is the fact that aside from the brief snatch of Zulu, Pang! is sung entirely in Welsh. In some ways that’s helpful: your love of Rhys’ lyrics depends, as September 13 In the five years since Charli XCX released her last album, she’s sworn that industry interference meant she would never make another. But here we are: after an overwhelmingly productive half-decade of unofficial releases and collaborations, Charli is an album proper, a diminishingly important semantic distinction but one that puts the 27-year-old firmly at its heart. Her last mixtape, 2017’s Pop 2, centered outsider guests in 10 diamond-hard would- be hits, laced with hard-partying nihilism and numbed with a measure of Auto-Tune that made Cher’s Believe sound like Etta ever, on your enjoyment of words that are allusive and opaque, rather than direct.

The English translations suggest Rhys is again worrying away at the state of the world in his own idiosyncratic way – the title and the title track express complete doubt about, well, more or less everything; Eli Haul is preoccupied with the effects of the sun (“Remember to wear a cap and spectacles on your travels”; Niwl O Anwiredd translates as Fog of Lies, which is self-explanatory. Even the more lyrically intimate Ôl Bys/Nodau Clust (Fingerprint/Earmarks) is wreathed in distrust: “Holy is your word / Holier is your password.”

But the lyrics being incomprehensible to those without the gift of Welsh allows the less linguistically gifted to focus instead on the melodies.

There’s a delicious circularity to Pang! and Bae Bae Bae, both springtime streams of songs that seem to speak to centuries of music (don’t come to this album expecting any electric guitar fireworks; it’s all acoustic and measured). Only on Ôl Bys/Nodau Clust is there any hint of insistence, and that comes from a juddering rhythm rather than fierceness in any other element – in fact, the harmonized chorus is almost churchy in its construction. And so Gruff Rhys offers another minor masterpiece, destined to be all but ignored by those not devoted to his cult. More’s the pity.