Cynefin: Shimli review | Jude Rogers's folk album of the month

(Recordiadau Smotyn Du)
Singer Owen Shiers combines traditional ballads, musical settings of poems, and originals built on stories collected from rural west Walians, all sung in Welsh

In the tiny kiln rooms of west Walian mills over a century ago, farmers would tell stories, read verse and sing songs through the night as their oats baked around them. This gathering was a shimli, a Welsh word that falls from the tongue with a similar softness to Carmarthenshire folk singer Owen Shiers’s delivery of these 11 quietly political songs.

Recording as Cynefin (a Welsh word for a place where we feel we belong), Shiers’s second album mixes traditional ballads, musical settings of poems and originals built on stories collected from rural west Walians, all sung in Welsh. Their arrangements are pastoral and lyrical, weaving in horns, double bass, piano and strings in a way that tilts towards Robert Kirby’s work with Nick Drake, while also sounding strangely sun-kissed and filmic (imagine Wales by way of a short hop to Iberia).