Trwbador - Trwbador

When a debut album starts with the line, “I’ve got a dirty mind, you’ve got a dirty mouth / When we talk it’s unnatural,” you know you’re in for a treat. But the main theme of this self-titled record from Carmarthen duo Trwbador isn’t sex or relationships; it’s the weather.

While it might occasionally make you think of other things, owing in part to half Dutch singer Angharad Van Rijswijk, and her icy yet whimsical vocals, songs like ‘Sun in the Winter’ and ‘Rain’ really are about the weather. Even when things feel like they’re getting more and more frantic towards the end of the former. ‘Rain’, incidentally, is one of the best tracks on ‘Trwbador’; the Welsh rap is well-placed, and even if you can’t understand it, it’s just really cool.

The album has some misses; the slurred ending of ‘Red Handkerchiefs’ ruins an otherwise perfectly cute, light song, although for some the high-pitched vocals will also be grating. It’s strange, then, that ‘Red Handkerchiefs’ may well be the song most people know, as it was used in an advert for Visit Wales. ‘Mountain’ similarly takes a little too long to get going, and treads a very fine line between upbeat and pounding.

But by and large, the album manages to straddle folky, almost nursery rhyme-like rhythms with hints of electronica. Single ‘Safe’ is just further proof of this; Van Rijswijk sounds softer, and the incredibly subtle hint of boy-girl vocals is done brilliantly.

Producer and other half of the duo Owain Gwilym also deserves praise for pulling on idiosyncratic sounds and creating genuinely unique sounds. Sure, sometimes it errs on the side of slightly kooky, but when they get it right, Trwbador are enrapturing.