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Cynefin: Shimli review | Jude Rogers's folk album of the month
Singer Owen Shiers combines traditional ballads, musical settings of poems, and originals built on stories collected from rural west Walians, all sung in Welsh
Their arrangements are pastoral and lyrical, weaving in horns, double bass, piano and strings in a way that tilts towards Robert Kirby’s work with Nick Drake, while also sounding strangely sun-kissed and filmic (imagine Wales by way of a short hop to Iberia). May carol Mae’r Nen Yn Ei Glesni (The Heavens Are Greening) is warmed into life by the Machynlleth Wind Band, while a spaghetti western flourish fills Shiers’s whistling on Cornicyll (Lapwing). The voices of Shiers’s interviewees also open Shili Ga Bwd (Wormwood) and Pont Llanio (a song about a factory that was a thriving community hub now long closed and choked with weeds), recalling King Creosote and Jon Hopkins’ moving experiments on 2010’s Mercury-nominated Diamond Mine.
Or read this on The Guardian
