Gwyn Glân Beibl Budr

Gwyn Glân Beibl Budr opens with ‘Myn Mair’, a prayer that is at least 500 years old, sung on the night before a funeral, appealing to Christ's mother to save the soul of the deceased friend or lover. The purity of Lleuwen's singing contrasts strongly with the abrasive guitar that punctuates it. It's a crashing together of opposites that makes sense of the album's title, which translates as Clean Gun Dirty Bible.

Lleuwen take lyrics that are deeply embedded in Welsh language and culture, such as ‘Cwm Rhondda’, and verses from three of William Williams Pantycelyn's hymns (he wrote almost 1,000), and sets them in unexpected ways. So, as well as the great triple harpist Llio Rhydderch, jazz pianist Neil Cowley and the tenor Rhys Meirion all appear.

Lleuwen's own songs have a hymnal quality (the first line of ‘Cân Taid’ is in English: ‘A song like a hymn flows through my blood’) yet they range widely in subject and musically. ‘Bendigeidfran’ is a summons to a giant from the Mabinogion, who laid himself across the waters, forming a bridge. Thus the earliest prose stories in British literature provide an image for these days of Brexit. ‘Caerdydd’ is about being alone in the Welsh capital despite ‘traffic on the roads and traffic on my phone’ and the strange allure of this. Thrashing guitar/elegant vocals, connection/isolation, crashing percussion/plangent harp – Lleuwen bravely drive these opposites together, and they cohere.