Bill Ryder-Jones
Iechyd Da

Bill, the former prodigy boy from Kirkby (but we can also say Liverpool) has finally found himself again.
I know what you're asking yourselves: but who would this Bill be?

For those who missed the previous episodes, Bill is a versatile English musician probably known to most for having been, from 1996 to 2008, the guitarist of the Coral (if you don't know them, drop everything and run to catch up).

In 2008 Bill left the band to embark on a solo career as a producer, multi-instrumentalist, composer, and singer-songwriter; he already has several solo albums on his CV, starting with "If...", based on the novel by Italo Calvino from 1979 "Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore", as they say, if the morning shows the day... up to the subsequent and much-acclaimed "A Bad Wind Blows in My Heart" from 2013, which Bill considers his artistic zenith.

It took 11 years for Bill Ryder-Jones to shake off the trap of self-sabotage after the release of "A Bad Wind Blows in My Heart".

"I love 'Iechyd Da', I'm not so proud of an album since 'A Bad Wind Blows in My Heart'," he declared. And that's a good thing because that album has always represented for Bill both a peak to be proud of, but at the same time a comparison that made him feel dissatisfied with every subsequent release: "I've always been very hard on myself for not surpassing that album, really," he says. "It's been a problem for me."

Fast forward to the present day: in January 2024, Domino Records released the latest "Iechyd Da" (a Welsh term that translates to "good health") an elegant pop album, meditative, majestic, dreamlike, ambitious, enveloping, and intimate.

If the game is that of resonances, then the pastoral folk of Nick Drake returns to the palate, the magnificence of the Flaming Lips of "The Soft Bulletin" ("This Can't Go on"), the dream pop with dreamlike atmospheres of Mercury Rev (I think of "I Know it's Like This" with that "Baby" sample by Gal Costa whose voice then floats in the background of the track like a ghost of a past love), the latest Blur and, why not, Lou Reed (I think of "It's Today Again" but also "If Tomorrow Starts Without Me" where Bill winks at Reed's own "Street Hassle").

Recommended. A great musical appetizer for 2024.