Cymru Am Byth: 18 Essential Welsh Albums In honour of St. David s Day.
Today - March 1st - is St. David s Day, a celebration of Welsh identity.
The strange thing is, though, we re no closer to defining Welshness than we were 100 years ago - it s a country in flux, code-switching and shape-shifting on an hourly basis.
Musically, however, we feel certain in saying that Welsh music - indeed, Welsh culture as a whole - has rarely been so strong, with new generations utilising the tools at their disposal to craft magnificent new aural shapes.
Clash writers have picked out 18 essential Welsh albums (caveat: we re starting at the year 2000) and we ve tried to look beyond the big names, blending seminal hits with some deep cuts, too.
But, this was Blackwood’s international day – with the boys that had taken the town’s name around the world coming home. It was a trip down memory lane and in the lead-up to the BBC Radio 2 homecoming gig, they showed DJ and host Jo Whiley around their old haunts.
The Manic Street Preachers are brought home to Blackwood by BBC Radio 2 Some are no longer there - Dorothy’s Café, Pizza House and their favourite record shops. Cwmfelinfach Miners’ Institute is another James Dean Bradfield paid tribute to, lamenting “they pulled it down”. This is where they recorded first single,
Nine potential song titles appear in the Instagram post.
‘The Secret He Had Missed (For August and Gwen)’, ‘Blank Diary Entry’, ‘Afterending’, ‘Diapause’, ‘Don’t Let The Night Divide Us’, ‘Happy Bored Alone’, ‘Still Snowing In Sapporo’, Orwellian , and ‘
Quest For Ancient Colour’.
As well as sharing the song titles, they also posted a progress update on their 14th studio LP. It s set to be the follow up to 2018 s
Resistance Is Futile record.
Bassist and lyricist Nicky Wire previously told NME that the record was sounding “expansive” and had a “retro-futuristic” vibe to it, and confirmed the title
February 24th, 2015
Live blogging the Brits 2015 is so 2008. Just look at every cultural media platform churning out the same predictable jokes about Sam Smith’s mopish demeanour and Ed Sheeran’s non-majority hair colour. Nobody laughs and we all get depressed. DiS, however, likes to be a little bit more cutting-edge than that, like the time it went gonzo Henry Hoover shopping with Nicky Wire or when it dared to fly in the face of the liberal-feminist media elite by asking Meredith Graves “what’s a pretty little thing like you doing in such a manly profession as this?” Hence, we placed JR Moores in our new Ryanair-sponsored time machine and sent him hurtling into the future to report on the Brit Awards in the year 2025 AD!!!. so he could make the same lame jokes about the gingerness of Sheeran. Here’s what impending horrors he witnessed:
Blimey, that went quickly!
The end of 2014 is nigh, and we’ve heard some cracking songs in its oh so brief existence. From Future Islands to ‘Fancy’, everyone’s got their favourite and they’re all completely different from each other. To find some order in the chaos, we asked over 30 Drowned In Sound staffers to vote for their top five singles of the year, then added up the results and made a list of the 40 most popular choices.
Read on for the final, definitive compendium and then subscribe to our Spotify playlist to listen to all the tracks in order.