Race Horses - Cake

Bet on Race Horses being one of your new favourite bands – these technicolour fantasists are bursting with ideas and brimming with brilliantly bizarre tunes. It’s this twisted pop sensibility that places them in the rich lineage of Welsh weirdness and sets them apart from their contemporaries.

“We’re utterly bored of reality, realism, and music and words that are too literal,” they say. “Most people lead very boring lives, so why write about that?”

Cake / Cacen Magmu is the four-piece band’s debut release, and it’s a double A-side covering two exceptional, giddy and totally different songs.

With lyrics about a chap who swaps hedonism for cookery, Cake is described by songrwriter Mei as “an anti-youth song” that rails against “day trippers and young people who think that dressing young and taking drugs makes them interesting.” It was recorded in a wooden hut in Cae Mabon, an eco village in North Wales described as “a Smurf-esque fantasy-land eco-paradise commune type thing” by the band. The fuzz guitar was recorded in a chapel, making it surely one of the most unconventionally recorded tracks in history.

By complete contrast, the dark and mysterious Cacen Magmu was designed to sound like a bad trip. Mei wrote the song having had little sleep for days and binging on Hitchcock films. Here, oompah brass meets cabaret and dischordant backing vocals in a twisted tale about a boy who becomes possessed by the spirit his evil grandmother. It ends with the protagonist taking a gun to his head, because his dead Gran has made his life so unbearable. But it’s in Welsh, so it’s unlikely you’ll have nightmares.

Comprising Meilyr Jones (vocals and bass), Dylan Hughes (keyboards, synths, guitar and vocal) Alun Gaffey (Guitar and vocals) and Gwion Llewelyn (drums and vocals), Race Horses met in the sleepy Welsh town of Aberystwyth - a perfect place for psychedelic pondering.

Both songs are taken from the forthcoming debut album, Goodbye Falkenburg, which has been recorded with producer Dave Wrench (a member of Julian Cope’s Black Sheep who has also recorded with Bat for Lashes, Hot Chip and British Sea Power etc) in a series of adventurous sessions over nine months. Conceived as a collage of someone’s life memories and taking a loose nautical theme, it’s an ambitious first fling from a band. “We wanted to make our fifth album first, if you know what I mean,” says Mei. And when you hear it, we think you will.

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