Gwenno / H Hawkline @ Soup Kitchen, 20 Sep

As September Sunday nights go, a co-headlining show from Heavenly Recordings’ Welsh label-mates Gwenno Saunders and H Hawkline, aka Huw Evans, sounds like what the pair’s homeland would call a noswaith dda. So it proves in a packed Soup Kitchen. Alone in front of a glitchy projector, Gwenno takes the stage first to promote her Welsh-language kraut-pop album Y Dydd Olaf, influenced by the obscure 1970s sci-fi novel of the same name. ‘It sounds cheery but it’s not,’ she laughs in her Cardiff lilt as she introduces the cascading Patriarchaeth, explaining each song’s themes light-heartedly for the obviously puzzled English audience. Although she reassures us that the lyrics are translated online, we don’t need to speak Cymraeg to understand the slinky Golau Arall or Chwyldro’s icy optimism for the survival of minority cultures. Gwenno closes with the haunting Fratolish Hiang Perpeshki which thrums with a robotic beat before it erupts into icy synthesisers that she jokes would fit onto the Radio 1 playlist, the soundtrack of any dystopian future.

H Hawkline's songs are more down-to-earth than Gwenno’s but the pair obviously share the same sense of humour. Evans shows himself to be a storyteller in the vein of Belle and Sebastian or The Shins as he yelps through literate rhyme schemes over the crunching garage chords of Moons in My Mirror and the dewy Rainy Summer. Sadly snapping a guitar string two songs in, Evans encourages us to laugh at his error, drawing attention to his constant retuning and his bickering with Gwenno as to who would headline the tour. Their egalitarian decision to split duties between north and south encapsulates the evening nicely as Evans invites his band back to help with closing falsetto romp It’s a Drag. It’s a stop-start affair but a pleasantly grounded evening for which we can only say diolch.