Listening to Tom Emlyn’s new album Rehearsal For the Rain: Scaredycat Vol.2 , it feels like Welsh psychedelia and progressive rock traditions have seeped deep into his very bones. Or maybe it’s the other way around, had time and mind to leach out from his marrow, permeating into the musical stew of this, his fourth long player.
Opener ‘Fire on Fairwood Common’ is a masterclass in full-on prog love, with a Tull presence nodding in amusement and one imagines approval, thanks to fellow Swansea native Felix Subway on flute, with ‘Hall of Mirrors’ superbly double-dosed.
Don’t be fooled and expect the predictable on this record; on blues-infused ‘Kafka’ Emlyn uses the underappreciated Paul McCartney practice of throwing in a hint of weird then marching swiftly on as if nowt happened. ‘I quit my job at the funeral home because it reminded me of you’ Emlyn reveals darkly with a stinging and witty twist, before rocking onward.
In ‘Double Crossed‘ he comes out with ‘I don’t know my neighbours…and I’ve never tried’. Bleak humour. Made me laugh when it came out as a single some weeks back and makes me laugh now.
‘Rehearsal for the Rain’ tricks us we’re being delivered of a wistful instrumental, until the softly muffled repetition of the title positively bleeds a sad sweet reflection. And then we have the sweetly chiming guitar of ‘Chemical Road’ to keep us guessing. So many layers on this record.
A prolific songwriter, Tom Emlyn is a man with lots to say and seeks out differing ways of doing so, both in music and out. A pursuit mirrored in Phosphorescence, the short story accompanying the album. In the story he takes a swim in the sea by Llangennith on the Gower peninsula near Swansea after a grey monotonous day of grey monotonous work (‘It gets late so early now’ he observes), and witnesses phosphoresence also known as bioluminescence, in the water around him. ‘A rare phenomenon in British coastal waters. Sea creatures such as plankton and algae produce gorgeous glowing lights and illuminate the sea. A sight you feel lucky to witness, as I did one night that summer. It inspired me to write the story,’ he says.
Phosphoresence tells of alienation, of not quite fitting in. ‘A sense of youth slipping away and wondering if the place you’ve ended up is the right place for you,’ he explains. It has Dylan Thomas‘s 1940 short story collection Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog as a literary reference point, and practically birthed thanks to a period Tom spent working as a dishwasher in a beach cafe. That summer he lived in a tent on the campsite and didn’t charge his phone for about three months.
‘So I felt quite remote and disconnected,’ he explains. ‘When you work as a dishwasher your mind is free to ponder all kinds of things. George Orwell knew all about this. He wrote about being a “plongeur” in Down and Out in Paris and London.’
‘I wanted to focus on imagery. Convey a sense of being out of place in quite beautiful surroundings. Mirroring some of the images of the sparkling phosphoresence in the water with the dish soap in the sink, the sand grains, the black ribs of the shipwreck mirroring the hands immersed in the soapy water.’
‘Llangennith (intermission)‘ is the perfect instrumental halfway through the album, electronic folk wizardry painting an aural picture of the spaced-out glory of phosphoresence. Listen to it before, during, after reading the story. It works all the ways.
In ‘I Don’t Want To Be A Rockstar‘, the omnipresent melancholies are underscored by a twirling organ before rocking out and returning to base. ’I don’t want to be a rockstar,’ Tom sings ‘I just want to play my guitar.’ The Nuggets organ stays put in ‘It Came Back To Me‘ and creates a simply wonderful slice of classic psychedelia. On album closer ‘Somewhere There’s A Dry Shore’ we are given an optimism thanks to pretty, skilled acoustic guitar picking.
Tom Emlyn insists the everyday concerns him the most in his songwriting, but he has the eye – and ear – to see the magical bits in the humdrum. Polishing them into diamonds, blinking and winking within the bland and brown.
Rehearsal For The Rain: Scaredycat, Vol.2 is out now via Lavender Sweep Records. The album is available on a limited edition C36 black cassette tape.
Photo credit: Billy Stillman
