Bill Ryder-Jones
Iechyd Da
★★★★
DOMINO
“I’M THE SAME as I’ve ever been,” Bill Ryder-Jones croaks ruefully on his Groundhog Day address, It’s Today Again. With the producer and former Coral guitarist’s fifth studio album, that’s once more a blessing and a curse.
The finest piano-in-the-sandpit songwriter of his generation, Ryder-Jones’s deft blend of heart-rending and transcendent has earned him usual suspects comparisons to Nick Drake and Elliott Smith in the course of a triumphant run of LPs: 2013’s baroque monster A Bad Wind Blows In My Heart, 2015’s grungy West Kirby County Primary, 2018’s Yawn. However, as with Cat Power or Ryder-Jones’s boyhood hero, Euros Childs, the intense beauty rarely comes without a troubling undertow.
The Zombies' Odessey And Oracle via Wings' Band On The Run, Iechyd Da (“good health” in Welsh) documents a period of intense anguish (see MOJO’s interview with Jones in this latest issue) with careful understatement and smart musical references: the Street Hassle strings on If Tomorrow Starts Without Me, the Stones piano on Nothing To Be Done, the Gal Costa sample on I Know That It’s Like This (Baby). Even so, the hope that Ryder-Jones is consciously striving for can be hard to find. Like A Bad Wind Blows In My Heart – the album Ryder-Jones says he has spent the last 10 years striving to top – Iechyd Da trumpets the redemptive force of love, but with the grim new knowledge that windswept and despairing is not such a sexy look at 40. With Hollywood strings and Phil Spector reverb, This Can’t Go On depicts a crisis soundtracked by Echo & The Bunnymen (“I walked all night to The Killing Moon,” he sings). It’s a plea for salvation imbued with a desperate longing for grown-up normality; “I want some kids,” he adds with lightly-crushing poignancy.
With samba-scented opener I Know That It’s Like This (Baby), Ryder-Jones suggests his personal baggage is more than anyone can handle, and intrusive thoughts undermine the elegant Christinha (“there’s a ghost you know who pulls at my strings, moves my hands toward the sharper things”). The liberal deployment of a children’s choir throughout Iechyd Da lends a queasy lightness to seriously dark material, and if the kids lift the mood on We Don’t Need Them, relief is only ever temporary. Thankfully For Anthony captures the aftermath of an existential near-miss; there are tears, friends rally round, and Ryder-Jones takes momentary solace. “I’m no good but I know love,” he mutters over an Ocean Rain-sized finale, but in the gaps between the words hangs the weariness, the exhaustion.
Iechyd Da is lyrically stark, but Ryder-Jones saves his most silvery linings for its darkest clouds, and with closing doodle Nos Da goes somewhere words can’t reach. Gavin Bryars strings come to the rescue of a melted piano. The inescapable conclusion: life is beautiful; life is sad; life goes on. Same old magnificent same old.
Iechyd Da is out now via Domino, you can buy a copy here: Amazon/Rough Trade
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