Review: Gruff Rhys – ‘American Interior’


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Gruff Rhys has never been shy of experimentation. ‘American Interior’ is an album that encompasses that notion.

Always moody, melancholic and melodic, it is delivered with a trademark craft of songwriting not unfamiliar with Super Furry Animals, but clearly something only he, the solo artist, could do in such a relaxed and chilled manner, able to make eyes close and dreams deliver the closet thing it has to reality right to the front of our dazed minds.

Opener – or the proper opener excluding ‘American Exterior’ with its cold and noise-driven 29 second assault on the senses – is a real treat. ‘American Interior’ is haunting with its piano balladry, harrowing with its backing vocals that sound like a choir assembled of cherubic shadows rather than innocent children, and heartfelt in its vocal line that sings of love but sounds like laziness; a lovely combination.

Never truly content with just one genre or style, the silly, stupid, ridiculous and refreshing ‘100 Unread Messages’ is like a song played by the Mad Hatter in one of his funny moods – unsure if he’s happy or sad. The drums fast, the imagination fucked, the dance-floor resembling a barnyard situated in a dystopian future’s highway; a great track to establish the craziness that drives the creativity for Rhys.

‘American Interior’; a book, but also an app, a concert tour and a documentary film, takes such multi-platform experimentation to a new level, maximising the atmosphere of the album when combing it with something stronger than oxygen and a few acoustic guitars.

The amount of platforms the album is released through could connote the amount of depth, thought and enigma which has gone into this record; always moving forward, but branching off into all kinds of footpaths very few can walk. The story Rhys wants to tell concerns the claim that North America was ‘discovered’ by Madog, a Welsh seafarer of Viking blood, three centuries before Columbus, and that evidence of his presence was preserved in the existence of a fair-skinned Welsh-speaking tribe in the remote fastness of the Canadian borderlands.

Yes, it’s mad, but so too is ‘The Last Conquistador’, which edges and shuffles forward with keyboard bubbles. Despite all of the mixtures thrown into one melting pot, and the extremity of the narrative, the actual bravado of the song is astounding. It never throws every instrument known to man in one studio and simply hits record. The tools are voice, drums, bass, guitar and a keyboard; mostly a child’s one, reflecting the innocence and the inexhaustible fantasy of what a story with such a crazy plot can produce.

This isn’t to say the album gets repetitive though. One must respect its intentions of telling a story; a complex story that needs time to breathe and think where the steps will walk, and therefore the pages will turn. As seen with ‘Liberty (Is Where We’ll Be)’, a gorgeous track depicting romantic affairs according to the child who never experienced them. The piano structures climb and climb behind a bass muffled but still motivated to keep the tune tight.

The robotic and sinister delivery of ‘Allweddellau Allweddol’ depicts infantile lost tribes circling a fire singing in their high-pitched voices, banging things out of boredom because they can. It’s a smile sure, but in terms of this song, with its spacious atmospherics, jazz timing and mutilated world-music devices, it can only be a smile hiding purest evil.



‘American Interior’ is a fantastic work of art. A rethink in a Welsh accent of what accidents can emerge as something solid. Gruff Rhys remains an individual made up of many moods. ‘Walk In the Wilderness’ gives the listener space to breathe in a perfectly executed collision course of powerful piano bashes, gentle country-influenced acoustic strokes and vocals that rise up and sink low in a melody designed to melt stars and shower us in an extraordinary symphony.

A bearded caveman with an acoustic guitar and a toy keyboard trying to emulate through sound the narratives that track through his mind is what it all sounds like.

A crusader in the creative arts, absent from anything that’s been done before.

(Ryan Walker)


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