Album Review: Gruff Rhys – Seeking New Gods


7.5/10

Gruff Rhys Seeking New Gods




Gruff Rhys goes where many others fear to tread; in a fifteen-year solo trot caused by the very long-term hiatus of the Super Furry Animals he’s made records about, amongst others, John DeLorean, Giangiacomo Feltrinelli and John Evans.

Never underinvested, whilst some artists describe a project as a concept album when it has a couple of tracks which mention aliens, few people have shown as much commitment to the principle as the man who on his last album Pang ended up with lyrics sung in Zulu.

The difference here is that Seeking New Gods isn’t about a god but about a mountain, specifically Mount Paektu in Korea, a still active volcano and supposedly the birthplace of Dangun, the founder of the first Korean kingdom more than 4,000 years ago.

So far, so Wikipedia. But given that Rhys has chosen to write material about the timeless quality of an ancient place, and in particular how its latent spirituality could be relatable to the human condition, the smart money was still not on it ending up sounding a bit like Steely Dan.

But then, guesswork about the Welsh man’s panoramic sense of direction has always been a fool’s errand.

The West Coast stylings were partially a byproduct of his environment, having pitched up in
California at the end of his last pre-pandemic round of gigs and also of a mammoth tour bus playlist of artists too lengthy and diverse to print here.

Unsurprisingly, someone who’s always dealt in ambiguity remains in his element on tracks such as Loan Your Loneliness, a terrific, freewheeling reboot of Reeling In The Years, complete with everlasting guitar solo and a subtext about whether existing almost forever whilst everything else dies is the hardest life of all.

If there was always a cynical, bitter undertow to music birthed from that post-idealist era of American life, it’s refreshingly absent.



Instead, the listener does well at this altitude to not be overwhelmed by the joyous, innocent pop of the hook-laden gem Can’t Carry On, and whilst it looks woefully cliched written down, closer Distant Snowy Peaks has a sort of gong-ringing purity attained
only by reaching a place where civilization is just another word.

Pressed, the singer has declared that the over-arching themes at play relate to ‘memory and time’, but underneath the congestion of these overlapping motifs perhaps it’s not just a reflection of the mountain that’s getting older, but the writer himself.

The bluesy drawl of Hiking In Lightning hints at former pasts, but to this end opener Mausoleum Of My Former Self perhaps tells the best tale: ‘As the mausoleum of my former self/My songs displayed upon the shelves/Remember this one, it caused me grief/This little number upset the priest’, the gamboling piano and brass throwing out some cantina-like warmth.

A mountain of course doesn’t know it’s had a load of great songs written about it, and even in sentience it probably wouldn’t do much to change things even if it did.

But Seeking New Gods is also about things much closer to home, physically and emotionally, on matters of impermanence and weakness and the things they makes us do.

You shouldn’t wait a thousand years to hear it.

Andy Peterson

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