A long road of tragedy, grief and catharsis leads to a career high for Bill Ryder-Jones.
Almost buried at the end of 2015’s West Kirby County Primary, Bill Ryder-Jones offered a clue to where he was with it all on Even Good Things Break My Heart, the album’s undersold peak. Sounding weary, the former Coral guitarist pushed out: ‘I’m too smart with my feelings/’Cause even good things break my heart’, before doubling down on the sentiment with: ‘I let good things in my heart/Then I’ll only harm myself’.
Everything’s consequential. In one of Britain’s biggest cult bands at 13 and then out of it by 25, the singer and his family had been enveloped by tragedy when his brother Daniel – to whom a song is dedicated on the same album – died in an accident at 9 years old. In the aftermath, the trauma was buried deep but Ryder-Jones is now finally coming to terms with that and the reality of the profound effects it has had on his life since.
Iechyd Da – the phrase in Welsh meaning good health – isn’t so much a coming-of-age record as one that shows working with grief is a journey rather than a destination. Time, after all, is a continuum, and since 2018’s softly spoken Yawn, work producing Michael Head, Saint Saviour and Brooke Bentham has convinced the reclusive polyglot that an alternative career branch lies there too.
Those slow nurtured green shoots now come with a new-found determination to let light in, a perspective framed as: ‘It were important for me to make a record that had more hope in it…even by my standards the last few years have been rocky, but I’ve chosen to soundtrack it with more positive music.’
Everything’s relative, of course, but opener I Know That It’s Like This (Baby) features snippets of Brazilian singer Gal Costa alongside its eggshell piano; a crushed, scattered pean to doomed romance and complicated people, but the tone at least is outward looking as opposed to the equivalent of watching the dust motes against the ceiling.
Once again at the controls, Ryder-Jones has described this fifth album as the ‘most produced’, which in his world means the addition of strings, piano and occasional children’s voices, whilst on the gilded instrumental …And The Sea…, the mercurial Head reads an excerpt from Ulysses, a device that mirrors the Baroque theatre much loved recently by his old band.
As if it could be the case, this is no attempt to cover up the pain in trickery. More often than not the delicate balancing act of revealing scars and salving them is carried off immaculately (If Tomorrow Starts Without Me, the ghostly I Hold Something In My Hand, Christinha), whilst the woozy ambient drone of closer Nos Da is the sound of reality ebbing away, back into dreams.
It would be incongruous by this point to describe anything here as resembling a kitchen sink moment, but if there were This Can’t Go On – on which the singer walks all night in the company of Echo & The Bunnymen finding only crossroad after crossroad – is suitably bathed in majesty; an epic, yearning noise which sounds happy to be so.
Almost 10 years ago Bill Ryder-Jones wrote a song about connecting with happiness as if it was something behind a door which he’d gladly closed for his own protection. Iechyd da is the sound of a man coming to terms with the consequences, but its beautiful, bony honesty and ambitious musical reach are impossible not to admire.
Unsurprisingly, this makes for the best solo album of his career.
