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Review: 9Bach, The Folk House
A deep dubby bass signals the start of Welsh band 9Bach’s return set at The Folk House, having graced last year’s Bristol folk festival with their particular brand of eclectic folk.
Or is it folk? Hailing from the Snowdonia slate quarrying town of Bethesda, singer/songwriter Lisa Jên Brown utilises familiar refrains from traditional old Welsh songs to colour her tales of decaying industry and hardships and the rugged beauty of the landscape, but it’s filtered through an intoxicating blend of influences from trip-hop to dub and Eastern European rhythms.
Since they started making ripples with their excellent Tincian album on the Real World Records label three years ago – voted BBC Radio 2 Folk Album of the Year in 2015 – 9Bach have made real headway, and their new album Anian is also creating a stir. The band have been nominated for Best Group at the BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards this year.
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And it’s no surprise when you experience them live. Lisa Jên’s vocals are mesmerising, and form close swooping harmonies with the voices of keyboardist Mirain Roberts and harpist Esyllt Glyn Jones, above a background of delicious drum and bass moods.
The big drum sound of Ali Byworth opens several numbers, with Dan Swain’s bass throbbing underneath with an ethereal Portishead-like quality. Together with Lisa Jên’s vocals, piano flourishes and inspirational Welsh harp, and Lisa’s husband Martin Hoyland’s guitar stabs, the band create a unique kind of indie-folk sound.
In between the songs, which cover most of Tincian and Anian, Lisa Jên is chatty and keeps up warmly entertaining explanations and translations of the material to non-Welsh ears. She can certainly talk, and she can certainly sing: her beautifully haunting vocals draw on the poetry of Welsh tradition and segue into the addictively inventive music of the band.
“We don’t do ‘diddly diddly’ Folk,” she confides to me afterwards. But what they do do is something very special and seems to be getting better and richer with the passing of time.
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