This is all wrong, really. In a world where professional Geordie Lauren Laverne (formerly of giggling Britpop punkas Kenickie) has become the slinky-clobbered indie queen of all broadcast media, where Jacques Le Cont (formerly of Britpop era 80s-electro revivalists Les Rhythms Digitales) is Madonna’s musical pimp and where the Longpigs’ guitarist is a solo Mercury Music Prize nominee for an album full of 40s-era ballroom laments (yes, yes, Richard Hawley), Cerys Matthews should by rights be ripping Robbie Williams a new oesophagus and giving Radio 2 DJs the horn every hour on the hour. Britpop also-rans Catatonia had their moments and served their purpose alright, delivering passable indie roughage, but with commercial success came little more than a thinning consistency and an annoying novelty hit about an outdated TV sci-fi duo. There was no doubting the real object of people’s fascination, and it goes without saying that wasn’t the reliable drumming of Aled Richard.
One of the most remarkable female voices of the 90s deserved more than Catatonia. Try as you might (and generally you mightn’t), you couldn’t see past the wild woman manically clutching her handbag and a bottle of wine at the front of the stage, channelling the wrath of the Gods through her larynx, draped in a fermented and bewitching Welsh valleys lilt. After rehab and a mainstream-pleasing duet with Tom Jones she seemed firmly placed on stardom’s up escalator, but following her muse ended up instead in Nashville, recording a becoming but indulgent country album in ‘Cockahoop’ which never quite inspired the emotion that inspired it. With ‘Never Say Goodbye’ though she briskly roams back into the sphere where you feel she belonged all along, harvesting both the sweet radiance and eccentricity of her personality and wrapping that around granite pillars of uninhibited songwriting.
There is the relatively straightforward indie gusto of her old band, with added chutzpah, through the brilliant snowballing ‘Oxygen’, there’s ‘Open Roads’, an upbeat Dusty Springfield slice of vaguely country pop, the harmony drenched simmering oil-lamp psychedelia of ‘Morning Sunshine’, the busy Beta-band-esque siren-led shuffle of ‘Ruby’, the fragmented hippie songbird tendencies of ‘A Bird In Hand’, not to mention the brilliantly absolute opener ‘Streets Of New York’ with its chunky Flaming Lips drums, wispy melodic intricacies, momentary discord and light-footed vocal details. At its most straightforward it is a beguiling folk album, rooted in tradition and simplicity, dainty guitars plucked amid a figurative meadow, poetic words easily related to. When it picks up speed though, when it really gains height, it becomes a myriad adventure in melody and possibility. Whatever standing she eventually achieves for herself, whether she gets a Mercury nomination or a pundit slot on one of those Channel 4 retrospective shows, she can know she has made the album she was always meant to. And that is no mean feat. It will be a small irony if no one notices. And we’ll all be poorer for that.