Carw

How do you react and create within a culture of diminishing returns and increasing reruns, one where any sense of a future has dissipated, where technology’s vice-grip on behavioural consumption has rendered any sense of progression redundant? The flick of a switch or the swipe of a screen can repurpose the past, uprooting and rerouting it to meaninglessness, history’s landmarks and events flattened into momentary distractions.

Like all aspects of post-modernist culture, what was once derided undergoes recuperation and becomes re-presented as ‘seminal, ‘ground-breaking’ and ‘unprecedented’. The 1980s is that time now. However, the 80s WAS an unprecedented time for culture; stasis and ‘retromania’ only taking hold towards the end of the decade.

‘New Pop’ music (circa 1980 – 1988) especially thrived in spite of economic disparity and decaying cities of former industry with artists using nascent technology to create progressive, forward-thinking sounds: context stimulating subtext.

It is these sonic seers that Welsh musician Owain Griffiths as Carw (‘deer) channels, refining perspiration and divining inspiration from the likes of OMD, A-ha, Vince Clarke’s many guises and New Order, yet never simply mimicking.

‘Intro’ is to opening salvos what Ronseal is to wood paint. Taking the pulse of what’s to come, stirring the senses into action.

Morrissey’s misery on ‘Heaven knows I’m miserable now’ is evoked on ‘Lovers’. Griffiths’s cooed wooing in ackowledgement of the suffering ‘passers by’ only this time the boots are on the other feet: stepping out as opposed to stepped over. The bouncing synths epitomise the spring-heeled conjoined couple’s conscious doubling.

Melancholy permeates ‘Y Galon Hon’ (‘This heart’) an achy-breaky organ pump that has a flourish that recalls Bronksi Beat’s ‘Smalltown Boy’ the perennial exile’s anthem. ‘Trac 3’ is a New Order bass-heavy Peter Hook-worm for a warm Bernard Sumner’s day.

Inspired by a dream of French sailors singing to their dog the ghostly and mostly instrumental ‘Au Revior’ says hello and goodbye, we’ll meet again, don’t know where, don’t know when.

Stand out ‘Feathers’ delineates the metaphorical and metaphysical loss of the exterior layers, the spiritual skin-shedding of the title, Griffith’s plaintive moans echoing Morten Harket. ‘Meirw’ (‘The Dead’) are alive on this club-dub flaw-filler, where absence of dance makes the party go longer.

In this age of the chancer, where many simply renovate and recycle the past as plastic pastiche, some strive to utilise it in order to make the present a better place. Like compatriot Gruff Rhys’s Neon Neon project, Griffiths’s ‘Skin Shed’ is one such: going back to the future to articulate the present.