Surely it's the only musical release of 2014 -- the only one ever? -- to have a direct connection with Madoc. The Pitchfork reviewer takes it from there; this album grows more interesting with each listen, and some day, we may be compelled to brew a Madoc-style Welsh ale and have a very atmospheric listening party.
Gruff Rhys: American Interior, by Stuart Berman (Pitchfork)
... Rhys’ capacious curiosity is given even greater room to roam with his latest solo project—the operative word being “project,” in the studious high-school-class-presentation sense. Its roots lie in Rhys’ recent discovery that he's a descendent of John Evans, a Welsh explorer who, in the 1790s, embarked on a solo voyage through America to locate the Mandan, an obscure tribe of Welsh-speaking Indians linked to a 12th-century Welsh prince named Madoc (who, as legend has it, touched down on our continent a good 300 years before Columbus). But rather than just update his Ancestry.com page and call it a day, Rhys booked a tour along the same path his forefather traversed. This wasn’t your standard-issue solo-acoustic campaign, but a multimedia PowerPoint presentation—booked into art galleries and lecture halls—chronicling Evans’ journey, interspersed with new songs inspired by it. Given that Evans died long before the invention of the camera, and no paintings of the man exist, Super Furry Animals’ go-to artist Pete Fowler built a puppet version of his imagined likeness to serve as Rhys’ onstage second banana and travel companion. Because that’s how Gruff Rhys rolls.
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