A new Swansea Sound album? What’s not to love? Hue Williams reunited on record with Amelia Fletcher, 35 years beyond their initial Pooh Sticks collaborations, joined by Rob Pursey (Amelia’s co-rider from Talulah Gosh and Heavenly days through to The Catenary Wires), Ian Button (Death in Vegas, Louis Philippe, Pete Astor, Papernut Cambridge), Bob Collins (The Dentists, The Treasures of Mexico), Bill Brewer, Jan Stewer, Peter Gurney, Peter Davy, Dan’l Whiddon, Harry Hawke, Uncle Tom Cobley and all on second long player, Twentieth Century.

I might have added a few more band members there, unless they’re the ‘Seven in the Car’ on track two, or those asked to ‘Pack the Van’ on the closing number of this delightful 12-song opus, bringing it all to a fitting sandy end. Besides, we’ve had ‘Route 66’, then Billy Bragg’s Essex alternative, ‘A13 (Trunk Road to the Sea)’, so a hymn to the less celebrated A4067 coast road from Swansea to Oystermouth and the Mumbles is alright by me.

And it’s a record every bit as appealing as debut Swansea Sound LP Live at the Rum Puncheon, released in 2021 to considerable acclaim, from a pandemically-formed outfit that came about mid-lockdown, recording their first three singles without even meeting – ‘Corporate Indie Band’ appearing as a cassette on the Lavender Sweep label, getting lots of airplay, the next releases on 7” vinyl, including ‘Indies of the World’, which reached the UK vinyl top 10.

The new record, out on Rob and Amelia’s Skep Wax Records (SKEPWAX016) this Friday, September 8^th on vinyl LP, CD, and digitally, lands in a month when the band are also set to play live on BBC 6 Music’s Marc Riley and Gideon Coe show and have been named as Huw Stephens’ album of the week on BBC Wales. What’s more, they’re touring the UK, with plans to play in the US and Japan in 2024.

So what do we get this time? ‘An album of sparkling pop-punk tunes from these lovable veterans of the indie scene… deploying their fuzzed-up guitars and melodic wiles in a set of loud, energetic pop songs… containing self-deprecating critiques of everything that was supposed to be great about the alternative culture of the 20th century, and of the way that culture left its adherents totally ill-equipped to deal with the reality of the 21^st.’ And I can’t argue with any of that.

‘Paradise got digitised, lithium and cyanide.’

Taking a closer listen, we start on side one, track one with ‘Paradise’, where ‘old-school futuristic synth-bleeps accompany Hue as he tries to establish some kind of relationship with a woman who only really exists on his screen,’ and ‘like an early ‘80s Gary Numan aficionado, he spends most of his life in digital isolation.’ Meanwhile, ‘thousands of miles away in a coltan mine, using their bare hands to dig out the precious ore that will provide the raw materials for the manufacture of Hue’s smartphone, impoverished workers lose their lives,’ the woman Hue hopes to communicate with remaining as elusive as ever.

Starting an LP with a song of the same name as the lead track on 1979’s A Different Kind of Tension is a brave thing to do for a band who openly love the Buzzcocks. But 44 years on, we know better than ever that ‘everything’s fake, nothing’s real’, and the added surf harmonies work well, on an album where many times I’m caught between enthusing about what I’m hearing and wondering if I’ve heard that melody somewhere before. No bad thing, for the record, so to speak.

‘Seven in the Car’ for me is a celebration of past nights out, in the case of myself and the band in question to see some indie outfit or other in the late ‘80s. While I never caught the shambolic live wonder of The Rosehips, I know exactly where the writer’s coming from, and feel I may well have been in that motor. Not sure if you could legally fit seven in the Allegro on the band t-shirt, mind.

‘Keep your head on, cos they will do anything to gaslight you.’

‘Keep Your Head On’ was the first single from this LP, and it’s something of an understated treasure for these ears, the band digging into the kind of ’60s underground roots Primal Scream once toyed with. And while I don’t often mention promo videos, the one for this is a thing of wonder (as linked here). Hats off to Amelia and Rob. An evening class act, you could say.  

‘Click It and Pay’offers ‘another cracked duet’, Hue the ‘stressed-out home-worker doing some online shopping’, Amelia ‘the girl in some distant hyper-warehouse who fulfils his requirements.’ They’ll never meet, but bond through CDs by The Police and Primal Scream that form part of his shopping list, as ‘21^st century romance amounts to no more than the purchase of music reissued from the 20^th’. The result is rather awesome Wire-esque fare that’d have me up the front in a heartbeat, a collision between Nuggets-style psych pop and indie punk, the sort of breathtaking number Graham Coxon was delivering in the mid-2000s.

And seeing as I’m down the front, I’ll stick around for dancefloor thriller ‘I Don’t Like Men in Uniform’, which tells a tale of frustration, the subject ‘still angry, still seething with pain’ but ‘no longer robust enough to sink his fists or his teeth into the authority figures he hates.’ As for the music, maybe it’s the missing link between Sparks, Buzzcocks and The Wedding Present.

‘Our clothes were black our amps were heavy, but were the population ready?’

Regarding killer riffs, they don’t come much bigger or more urgent than that driving wondrous title track and second single ‘Twentieth Century’, the tale of‘a pseudo-punk singer in fatigues, a purveyor of radical anthems, cushioned by a major label deal, who wonders why he’s lost contact with his once-devoted fans’ and ‘can’t tell whether he cares more about his integrity or his record sales.’ And that chugging Mekons-like guitar and glorious vocal jostling between Hue and Amelia is somewhat sublime. Oh, and another honorary mention for the inventive promo video (linked here).

When I say The Mekons, you realise I mean ‘Where Were You?’ I was going to say this is their 21^st century take on that, but that would only confuse, going by the title. What’s more, they’re not content to just rest on the laurels of that ‘insistent, infectious guitar riff’, the middle-eight taking us elsewhere, in a ‘Townshend at his best’ kind of way. And you probably know me well enough by now to realise at least once a year I’ll write about a single deserving to top any number of charts, adding ‘it won’t be a hit in this day and age, but it bloody well should be…’ or words to that effect.

‘I Made a Work of Art’ sees a return to the bandmates’ indie past, I’d say. And do you know what? They not only pull it off all these years on, but I reckon they’re doing it better than ever. There’s power in an indie art punk union, it seems. And while we’re on the high points, ‘Markin’ It Down’ is next, and while we’ve had a few great songs about record shops – Jeffrey Lewis & the Voltage’s lo-fi indie classic ‘LPs’ for starters – this is a different spin, you could say, pitched somewhere between  The Modern Lovers, Lou Reed, and Robert Foster. Complete with its own sonic nudges, nay respectful nods to Kleenex, Can, and The Fall. Marvellous.

‘Sitting in his easy chair, he runs his hands through greying hair
And contemplates his country estate.’

On ‘Punish the Young’, we have ‘an ageing rock icon and sometime rule-breaker’ who ‘curses the young people of 2023 who couldn’t care less about his heroic past,’ despising them ‘because they don’t want to work for shit wages on the trout farm that he bought with his royalties back in the 1980s.’ Roger to that, eh. A little more guitar-driven, this, but with that ‘60s underground DNA apparent, The Kinks and Teenage Fanclub in there, those surf harmonies returning.

As for ‘Far Far Away’ (first, the Buzzcocks, now Slade, eh?), their ‘love song to Pete Shelley, a tribute to a true 20^th century hero,’ I feel I should know that guitar vibe in the chorus. The Banshees or Magazine, perhaps? Anyway, I can envisage rock’n’roll animals Hue and Amelia heading off stage to start on the rider while their guitar god and rhythm buddies in the band deliver an extended jam on this number. Yeah, right.

For ‘Greatest Hits Radio’ – a real builder, I feel, and not necessarily like Wendy’s mate Bob, with Amelia’s added vocal making me think of Girls at our Best – the band focus on both ‘the brutal 19^th century slate mines of North Wales’ and ‘digital corporations of the 21^st, extracting as much profit as they can from two things people need: shelter and entertainment.’ Is this the band’s title song revisited? A ’Swansea Sound (Pt.2)’, that song’s grim take on radio broadcasting once more examined? Well, within we hear the voice of a ‘young girl forced to work in the contemporary coltan mine – as downtrodden and as abused as the kids who toiled underground in Blaenau Ffestiniog to extract the slate 200 years ago.’

So where is the hope?  Well, the music – as ever – is joyful, guaranteed to ‘put a smile on your silly indie face’, not least closing number ‘Pack the Van’, where ‘the band make fleeting contact with the pure idealism of their early teenage years, remembering the beautiful beach on the South Wales coast that provided the backdrop to their passionate youth.’ And as they put it, ‘maybe if we could access that optimism again, we might find a way forward…’

‘So if we pack the van, maybe we’ll find the coast road.
And where it turns to sand, the sky will still be gold.’

I’m getting the wistful positivity of It’s Immaterial’s ‘Driving Away from Home’, or maybe Neil Finn’s ‘Taking the Rest of the Day Off’. There’s also – probably because of the title – a reminder of lost BOB classic, ‘Another Crow’, my favourite song about touring {‘We travelled around but we didn’t see nothing new. In the back of the Transit, I wrote a song for you. Another motorway, another crow, and I’m afraid I forgot how your song goes.’)

And that brings me to another tour song, having talked to Ian Hunter about Mott the Hoople’s ‘Saturday Gigs’, mentioning ‘sehnsucht’, the German word meaning nostalgia for a place or time you’ve never visited. I felt that way about those early ‘70s Mott shows in Croydon, somehow sad I wasn’t there… and the same goes for Hue and co.’s coastal road trip. However, as is the case elsewhere on this record, it’s as much about anywhere as there, the Go-Betweens-style feel making me think it could as easily be about taking the road north or south from Brisbane or Sydney. Such is the power of a great song.   

I like the fact that they never pretend to be anything other than creatures of the last century, happy to ‘celebrate the joy of cramming into a car with loads of mates to see a gig at a crappy indie venue in the small town where they live’, as is the case on ‘Seven in the Car’.  And ‘they don’t see why that kind of joy needs to stop: in fact, it may be one of the important things we’ve got left.’ True, that. Here’s to future spot-on political and social observations, cracking songs, and wistful thinking, Swansea Sound style.

Swansea Sound are playing a number of live dates this Autumn, their September 9^th Rough Trade East album launch in Brick Lane, London E1 (tickets) followed by visits to Manchester, The Talleyrand, September 14 (tickets); Cardiff, Moon Club, September 15 (tickets), Carmarthen, Cwrw, September 15 (tickets); Bristol, Rough Trade, September 17 (tickets); St Leonards, The Piper, September 29 (tickets); Paris, Popfest, September 30 (tickets); Leeds, Wharf Chambers, October 13 (tickets); Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Cumberland Arms, October 14 (tickets); Brighton/Hove, The Brunswick, October 27 (tickets); and London, The Water Rats, October 28 (tickets).

For the latest from Swansea Sound, check out their Facebook, Instagram and Twitter accounts, and also keep in touch via the Skep Wax Records website and their Bandcamp pages.

For this website’s December 2022 feature/interview with Rob Pursey of Swansea Sound, head here. For November 2021’s feature/interview with Hue Williams, head here. And for June 2021’s featuyre/interview with Amelia and Rob, marking the release of The Catenary Wires’ Birling Gap LP, head here.