‘Cool Head’ is defined by subtle experimentation, highly accessible melodies and clever, heartfelt lyrics that have always been Georgia Ruth’s forte. Her attention to the smallest musical detail allows her to draw out the latent emotion of a moment…it’s her strongest offering yet.
Since winning the Welsh Music Prize for her 2013 debut, Week of Pines, Georgia Ruth‘s albums have come at regular but leisurely intervals. Fossil Scale was released in 2016, followed by 2020’s Mai, her first album for Cardiff-based indie Bubblewrap Collective. From the start, she has cultivated a marriage of delicate folk-pop melodies with classic singer-songwriter appeal. Over the course of the decade, she has added further elements to her sound, with each subsequent release delving further into psychedelia, weird folk, synth-pop, lo-fi aesthetics and the Welsh language.
Cool Head, her second album for Bubblewrap, is defined by the combination of subtle experimentation, highly accessible melodies and clever, heartfelt lyrics that have always been her forte. Opener Signs begins with found sounds and then moves, via a graceful piano, into flowing chamber-pop territory. But, as is now customary in Georgia’s songs, the apparent simplicity of the music conceals some unusual lyrics and unconventional melodic choices. The sheer range of her influences these days is felt on songs like the part-improvised Falling, which finishes with an impressive electric piano solo which she says was directly inspired by Ethiopian legends Hailu Mergia and Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou.
But what makes Cool Head something of a departure is not so much in the sound as in the ideas that helped form the album. For one thing, it’s not often that you come across an album on which one of the songs is written by a fictional character. But that’s the case here. Georgia’s debut novel, Tell Me Who I Am, is set to be released alongside Cool Head. The novel’s main character, Jude, is a reclusive musician who writes the song from which the book takes its name. That song also appears here, a beautiful, stark examination of self-doubt set to a country-ish rhythm section and boasting a stirring backing vocal from drummer Gwion Llewelyn as well as some stately violin.
Another central theme is the importance of family. The album’s title comes from something Georgia’s father used to say to her in times of trouble, and the songs were written shortly after her husband (the album’s guitarist, Iwan Huws) suffered a serious illness. So, there is understandably a certain amount of darkness lurking at the edges of these songs, but more tellingly, there is an overriding feeling of hope. Driving Dreams represents a fantasy of freedom that feels entirely, deliciously attainable. It is inspired by Glen Campbell and features some soft-focus horns and the far-reaching swell of a string section. There is an expansive, unconstrained energy at play: the Welsh-language Duw Neu Magic, which was written just before Huws underwent heart surgery, seems to draw from some special place of spiritual succour, a feeling evident even to an English monoglot. That succour enlivens even the briefest of songs: at less than a minute and a half, Eucalyptus contains whole worlds of hope and nostalgia and wanderlust.
Georgia has plenty of connections in the Welsh music scene. She has previously collaborated with the Manic Street Preachers, and Cool Head features a stellar cast of musicians, including Stephen Black (better known as Sweet Baboo) and Melin Melyn’s Rhodri Brooks, while Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci frontman Euros Childs sings backing vocals on the sweetly confessional Chemistry (which sounds like a Welsh Big Thief with an added swell of strings). Brooks provides a winning passage of pedal steel on Better Off Blue, a rangy country-folk tune that morphs into tear-stained, Lambchop-esque soul and back again.
Although Cool Head borrows from the music of the past – particularly a kind of folk angled towards Americana – Georgia is not afraid to introduce more contemporary elements, like the stippled pattern of electronic drums that runs through Would It Kill You to Ask, which could otherwise be mistaken for the work of some lost sixties folk singer-songwriter. The modern touches dovetail seamlessly into the overriding vintage aesthetic: the folky minimalism of Dim, another Welsh language song, builds into an unapologetically rich tapestry of strings, and the tiny, knowingly retro instrumental OK Diner A55 could be the soundtrack to a Wim Wenders road movie shot on the North Wales Expressway.
Georgia is a harpist by trade and began learning her instrument at the age of seven, and although the harp doesn’t play the biggest of roles on Cool Head her classical background is apparent in the way the songs are weighted. Her attention to the smallest musical detail allows her to draw out the latent emotion of a moment, and the album as a whole is cleverly sequenced, funnelling the listener to its final three songs, which provide three of its most poignant moments. When It All Comes Down has a classic Sandy Denny-meets-Laurel Canyon sound, which provides a bedrock for a tender and touching lyric about vulnerability growth in times of personal difficulty. The song is lifted into something approaching exaltation by Georgia’s singing – which becomes more unfettered as it reaches the conclusion – and by a lilting passage of violin courtesy of Angharad Davies.
I’m Not Driving is the twin to the earlier Driving Dreams, and mirrors that song’s position on the album, giving weight to Georgia’s assertion that Cool Head represents a journey, a feeling of getting over a certain kind of impotence when it comes to dealing with what the world throws at you. Here she is at her most candid, her lyrics rooted in real-life events but somehow all the more dreamlike for it. The final track, the Appalachian song Bright Morning Stars, sees her come full circle to her folkiest of influences. Sung a cappella, and with Euros Childs once again providing vocal assistance, it has the gentle, powerful quality of a hymn or a spiritual, and provides the most rewarding sort of closure.
An awful lot has happened in Georgia Ruth’s personal life and in the world at large since her debut eleven years ago, but what hasn’t changed is her enviable gift for creating gorgeous, open-hearted folk songs full of intelligence, invention and emotional weight. Cool Head is an album with the feel of an instant classic about it, and is her strongest offering yet.
Cool Head is out on 21st June 2024 via Bubblewrap Collective.
Pre-Order (Vinyl, CD + Novel Bundle available):
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