Welsh songwriter Tom Emlyn makes honest, swirling songs: tall tales laced with dark jokes, and words that cut straight to the bone. He has shared stages with Gruff Rhys, Charlotte Church, Gwenno, Dafydd Iwan and The Levellers. His solo work maps an alternative South Walian landscape, a hallucinated community drawn from psychogeography and built on local history. Anthropological observations shape his poetic lyrics, set to simple melodies shaped by 60s folk, all of it asking what it means to belong to a place. Bitterness, love and humour peep through the cracks of this layered, ethereal music.
Now Emlyn returns with an acerbic, post-punk-tinged single. Self-produced, it explores political anger, dissatisfaction, and inequality. He wrote the song during the years of Tory rule, when it felt as though they might never end. Its themes have only grown sharper in our late-capitalist, post-truth era. Greed, it turns out, never goes out of style.
The track rests on droning, angular electric guitar and electronic motorik drums. The words are chanted rather than sung, as if the whole thing were unfolding at a political rally.
Emlyn explains the thinking behind the lyrics: “They aim to personify a spirit of avarice and unfairness, a reversed or alternate Robin Hood figure, stealing from the poor to give to the rich. Which, actually, is how the world works. We don’t live in a meritocracy. You could say the character in the song is end-times capitalism personified, or inequality given the form of a sinister creature.”
The words began life set to very different music, much folkier and strummier. “That could have been a bit too obvious and risked sounding ‘preachy,'” he says, “so it worked better in this surrealistic indie rock arrangement.” The melody was stripped away along with the folky chords, replaced by a sprechgesang delivery in the style of Black Country New Road or The Fall.
Longtime collaborator Egg Spectrum supplied the programmed electronic drums, and a scattering of psychedelic overdubs deepen the soundscape, including the crash of a spring reverb being whacked.
‘Rich Man’s Robin Hood’ is released on 20th November on Dirty Carrot Records.
Tom Emlyn photo by Billy Stillman Photography, courtesy of Beast PR
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