The last album from Hen Ogledd, 2018's Mogic, reviewed by me here, was utterly unlike anything else I'd heard in 2018. It was a dense record, full of the clattering of instruments and the flourishing of musical ideas embraced and discarded. The band's newest one, Free Humans, dropped on Domino yesterday and it's an altogether more accessible affair. Still risky, the music of Hen Ogledd in 2020 seems more warm and approachable somehow.
"Trouble" is fairly direct, while "Crimson Star" seems of a piece with Richard Dawson's own recent work, even if it's less abrasive. Elsewhere, "Space Golf" is a crazy cousin to early Broadcast efforts, while "Flickering Lights" marries a spiritual organ pattern to a number that's nearly hushed and elegiac in mood. Look, it's a losing game trying to describe this stuff because Hen Ogledd really are opearting far, far outside the usual boundaries of indie-rock.
Free Humans, like the last Hen Ogledd release, still sounds like the work of musicians oddly focused on force-melding the back-catalogs of Captain Beefheart and Fairport Convention. And yet, this one somehow soothes more than it agitates. For every moment that seems easy to understand, there's another (or a dozen) that seems wilfully obtuse and brutalist. On Free Humans there seem to be fewer noisy bits, but this four-piece still remain in their own orbit, pursuing a muse that brings in pieces of jazz, folk rock, post-rock, and fusion in the service of material that's woefully British, willfully iconoclastic, and thankfully bold and impressive.
Free Humans is out now via Domino.
More details on Hen Ogledd via the band's official website.
[Photo: Rosie Morris]