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Merseyside romanticism twins Liverpool and its surrounding region with the lost islands of British mythology, mystical places such as Avalon where King Arthur’s sword Excalibur was supposedly forged. In The Beatles Anthology book, Paul McCartney hymns the sense of “apartness” he felt growing up there: “It’s even got its own accent within about a ten-mile radius.”
Bill Ryder-Jones’s hometown, West Kirby, lies just within that perimeter. It is a coastal town on the Wirral peninsula on the other side of the river Mersey from Liverpool. Ryder-Jones is himself a musical descendant of Macca and The Beatles, the moptopped Arthurian knights of British pop. He used to be in The Coral, standard bearers for Liverpudlian psychedelia in the 2000s. They are still active, but without Ryder-Jones: he left in 2008 due to panic attacks and agoraphobia.
Named after the Welsh drinking phrase for “good health”, Iechyd Da is his fifth solo album. It looks back to 2013’s A Bad Wind Blows in My Heart, which Ryder-Jones rightly considers his best work. The bleary slacker-rock of his previous studio album, 2018’s Yawn, has been jettisoned in favour of jangling guitars and orchestral grandeur. The blend of majesty, melody and melancholy in the songs, with Scouse terms like “youse” in the lyrics and a sense of distant connection to ye olde days of Merseybeat, is like a Liverpool version of fado.
Indeed, the album opens with a fragment of a Portuguese-language song. It is a ghostly sample of “Baby” performed by the Brazilian vocalist Gal Costa, heard faintly as though from a faraway place. The album’s back story involves a break-up between Ryder-Jones and his former girlfriend, who is from Brazil. He also addresses his struggles for mental wellbeing, including self-medication with drink and drugs. But the songs are too hazy to qualify as memoir.
Ryder-Jones’s voice is sleepy and croaky, like someone struggling to get out of bed. The drumbeat is a slow march, verging on a plod. Melody and switches in intensity save him, and us, from monotony. There are moments when the songs seem to billow like sails, buoyant with string and horn arrangements, ascending chords and the piping innocence of a children’s choir. Then comes deflation with a return to plain strumming and Ryder-Jones’s drowsy vocals. The contrast is vivid. It brings to life the album’s themes of aloneness and refuge, a Merseyside dream of loss and recovery.
★★★★☆
‘Iechyd Da’ is released by Domino
