Wednesday 23 December 2009

Race Horses - New Waves @ Breaking More Waves

Welsh band Race Horses are an experimental guitar pop four piece that used to be called Radio Luxembourg, but have now settled with a new hoofed up name. They consist of Meilyr Jones, Alun Gaffet, Dylan Hughes and Gwion Llewelyn. Their Myspace page may describe their sound as ‘Bagpipes in the supermarket / Elvis on a comedown’ but the reality is that Race Horses sound like they’ve been sitting in an attic, smoking some slightly dodgy cigarettes and listening to classic psychedelic sixties garage pop bands. Wacky and off-beat in their nature, we hear influences of The Byrds, Syd Barrett and the Super Furry Animals in their music.

The band have so far released three singles, Cake, the welsh language Glo Ac Oren and the Man In My Mind EP which Steve Lamacq picked up on BBC 6 Music under his New Favourite Band feature earlier this month. The lead track of the EP bundles over itself with chugging exubberant guitar based energy, arms aloft lad chanting and moments when the whole song appears to trip over and tumble into a forward roll down the stairs. The group have recorded an album called Goodbye Falkenburg which the band claim is loosely based on the memories of an imaginary German seaman who on his deathbed contemplates his life and the way the world will be in the future. It is of course wrong to stereo type bands just on the basis of their homeland but it does seem that these groovy Welsh boys share a kindred spirit with both Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci and the aforementioned Super Furry Animals in producing carefree out there ideas that are not influenced by the here and now. Here's Man In My Mind.

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