Slate
Deathless EP
Brace Yourself Records
Out now
Someone’s going to call Slate “The Welsh Fontaines D.C.” soon, so it might as well be us. Like their Irish counterparts they’re influenced as much by their nation’s tradition of poets as by music old and new. And like them they’re raw, primal, propulsive and… well, fucking fantastic.
How often do you stumble across a new band that stops you in your tracks? How often does a band come along to capture the zeitgeist and define a generation with its sound? The Sex Pistols did it. Joy Division did it. The Jesus And Mary Chain did it. Public Enemy did it. Who was the last one? For me five years ago it was Fontaines D.C.
Now there’s another one: Slate.
This time it happened entirely by accident, which is always the best way – not an email from a PR, not a poster on a wall, not a rave review on another website, just word of mouth; from one single mouth. They were second on the bill to someone I’ve already forgotten, in an East London pub late last year. Not that the headliners were a disappointment; they were great. It’s just that by the time they came on I’d already lost my heart to an unknown quartet from Wales.
Three boys and a girl from Cardiff, barely into their twenties, they had the confidence, the bravado, the self-assurance, the style, the sound, the talent. All of it in spades. When I tapped one of them on a shoulder to express my appreciation after they finished their set, they beamed with the genuine thrill of a child being complimented on a walk-on role in the school play; they’re almost that young. Long may they remain unjaded by compliments for plenty will surely be coming their way.
Slate really have got the lot: a supremely arrogant front man (Jack Shephard) with the looks and the swagger and the voice and a penchant for poetry; a supremely skilled guitarist (Elis Penri) who doesn’t have to show off to prove it; a supremely deranged drummer (Raychi Bryant) who probably gets through drumsticks and drumskins like guitarists get through plectrums; and a supremely stately bass guitarist – and occasional keyboard player (Lauren Edwards) – with a gift for ghostly harmonies.
On that early November night I hadn’t come across them before, though I later found footage on YouTube of them at the 100 Club a year earlier so this clearly wasn’t their debut in London. But that probably was. Then there were the two songs they’d put on YouTube: just two. One was called St Agatha and dealt with their national identity, apparently inspired by school tales of a graveyard on the Welsh border where bodies were buried with their heads in Wales but their feet in England: a perfect metaphor for the conflicted feelings of being both Welsh and British.
But it was their first tune, Tabernacl – yes, spelt like that with no E at the end – that properly blew me away: a tense, brooding, propulsive affair with a claustrophobic atmosphere; the guitar, bass and vocals each following a different but complementary melody line, underpinned by a distinctive drumming technique with undertones of The National’s outstanding Bryan Devendorf – the drumming equivalent of a *lead* guitarist, where he makes his instrument more than the rhythm component – and Shephard’s powerful incantations of regret and acceptance.
Like their Irish counterparts Fontaines D.C., Slate say they are inspired as much by the written word, particularly the French surrealist Rimbaud and Welsh poets like R.S.Thomas and Dylan Thomas, as by musical influences including Sonic Youth and My Bloody Valentine, The Doors and The Beach Boys, and newer bands like Floatie and Just Mustard. The four of them enjoy playing poetry games in the pub, passing paper around with each writing a line or a couplet before passing it on. And they are clearly aware of their place in a national tradition, citing another Welsh poet Brian Harris’s words: “To be born in Wales, not with a silver spoon in your mouth but with music in your blood and poetry in your soul, is a privilege indeed.” In which case the four members of Slate are especially privileged.
They’ve got that rare ability to sound at once vaguely familiar yet refreshingly new and, most importantly of all, they understand the importance of space. Not the black infinite universe up there, but the dramatic effect of leaving room for the music to breathe. Extraordinarily, Lauren had never picked up a bass guitar before the band formed in 2021, having previously trained as a classical guitarist before delving into ambient music, while guitarist Elis says his natural home is the blues and multi-instrumentalist Raychi is as much at home with the piano as his drum kit. Together they are much more than the sum of those parts.
Deathless (a title drawn from a review of Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures) is a collection of six new tunes that follow in their tradition of storytelling in song; each of them recorded in a single take and each one a reaction to its predecessor, balancing light and shade, melody and ferocity – which is essentially the band’s USP. They call it an EP but at 26 minutes it could equally be an album; LPs were often shorter than that in the pre-CD era.
Deathless is a conceptual entity, following the arc of an imaginary hero’s journey through the course of a single day, from dark beginnings to a final transformational epiphany, though there are no specifics, no sense of place: it could all take place in one room, or in one mind.
Opening track Remoter Heaven begins in a dream state, Penri’s gently hypnotic guitar curlicues gradually growing in intensity as Raychi’s drums crash like waves from a rising tide and Jack paints a picture of innocence: a child playing in some flowers suffers the sudden pain of a thorn pricking his leg. “I was awake with feeling,” he declares; which is rather more poetic than “Ouch!” And as the intensity grows, the ghostly presence of Lauren’s backing vocals hovering like a guardian angel on Jack’s shoulder, while Raychi’s guitar twists and turns into a fizzing squall of dissonance. It’s epic.
While that’s an extraordinary opening, Slate sustain it: the tempo doesn’t drop – and nor does the quality – on the next tune, The Heir, building towards a crescendo before conversely collapsing into a funereal finale, then bleeding into Sun Violence, a song that transports Slate’s sound to its furthest extremities with Raychi’s frenzied drumming as the guitar whips up a cyclone of chaos and Jack’s mantra-like chants teeter on the brink of mania in the eye of the storm.
The title track, Deathless, is a brief poem of the type Shephard habitually recites between songs onstage, lending him an air of Jim Morrison (and you sense he’s aware of the comparison) before the maelstrom returns on Shade In Me, Jack exchanging vocal lines with Lauren. It’s a plea for compassion inspired by a monologue from a Chinese film (A Sun, 2019) in which a character complains that while his friends can always find shade to shelter them from the absurdities of life, he can never hide from the sun. The final track, Hailstone, slows down the pace to an ominous crawl and completes the cycle, ending at the beginning by referring back to that painful thorn. “Gyring in the gorse petals / It was a pretty thorn that pricked my leg / Stood in the blinding light.”
And soon, I’m sure, Slate will be standing in the blinding light of mass acclaim.
More of Tim Cooper’s writing at his Louder Than War author’s archive and at Muck Rack. He posts music daily at EatsDrinksAndLeaves.com
Slate play The Windmill in Brixton, London, on 5 June.
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