As D. Gwalia’s Christian name isn’t in the public domain, I’m not going to blow his cover, but please rest assured that there will be no cheap comparisons either to a bibulous Welsh poet or a rather influential singer songwriter from Hibbing, Minnesota. In any case, comparisons are redundant, as Gwalia is a thoroughly distinctive and compelling artist in his own right.
The tone of this superb album is that of an inescapably dark folk tale, with the doom-laden atmosphere maintained from the first decrepit accordion wheezes of the title track to the infinitely prolonged, almost Eumenidal violin note running through the guilt-hushed traditional ‘The Cruel Ship’s Captain’. Puget Sound is a waterway in Washington State, Gwalia happens to be Welsh, and the lyrics namecheck American actors, French adventurers and Jewish kings, but the air of understated menace can only be derived from English balladry.
‘Black Current’ encapsulates all that’s best about the album. Gwalia’s minimal electric guitar (he plays rather in the style of Polly Harvey) is given epic power by a grinding cello bass, and his authoritative, reverb-drenched baritone demands you listen. The lyrics are elusive but fascinating. When he sings ‘It’s not over til the young girl sings her song/ We don’t know her and she’s in our living room’, the mind is full of questions about her identity and motives. Is she a ghost? A memory? A sister? A daughter? Why is she singing? What secret does she have to tell? Gwalia doesn’t like easy answers and like all good post-modern artists he invites the listener to write the story to fit the song.
Thirteen ‘Black Currents’ would make for a hard listen, but Gwalia varies the diet skilfully. ‘All Avenues’, a somewhat ramshackle accordion-dominated track, is one of the saddest and loveliest drinking songs ever written, combining with eccentric humour a toast to Molly Ringwald and a steal from The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. ‘Lost Volts’ is a swirling, distorted single-chord interlude, which is pretty and evocative in itself and cleanses the palate in time for the viola introduction to ‘Solomon Empire’, a meditation on the comic futility of temporal human achievements.
‘And When is She’, played I think on a thumpy harmonium (Gwalia either can’t or won’t buy instruments that don’t wheeze or clunk) sounds like one of those frightening nursery rhymes that haunted all our childhoods (Not for nothing did Orwell make ‘Oranges and Lemons’ a leitmotif in Nineteen Eighty Four). ‘The Burn’ has an excellent, world-weary chorus that reminds me a little of the Pixies ‘Where Is My Mind?’ and might make a good single. But in the end, this album deserves to be heard in its magnificent entirety. Ideally you should probably listen to it in a Victorian dive in Aldwych zonked out of your head on absinthe or shivering in a granite hovel in the Cairngorms. I did so while making fish pie in Newport Pagnell. Whatever. Find an hour in your schedule. You have got to hear this.