Jon Langford Saves the Wales

Onstage recently in the back room of Schuba’s Tavern in his adoptive hometown of Chicago, the singer Jon Langford introduced a song he called the Welsh National Anthem. His band, one of many fronted by the multifaceted guitarist and songwriter, was called Skull Orchard, and played an often rollicking repertoire of songs about Wales. That’s where Mr. Langford grew up, and it’s where he returns — in spirit, at least — when he convenes the group.

In Mr. Langford’s imagination, Wales has been waiting for its true and destined king to return and take his rightful place in history. That man is Tom Jones. After Mr. Langford finished his exclamatory spiel, the band punched into a loud, woozy waltz. Yes, it was “Delilah,” which Mr. Jones made a hit in 1968. As the crowd joined in on every lurching “why, why, why” refrain, a devilish grin swept across the singer’s face. Sometimes you can go home again.

This week, Mr. Langford won’t be the only wandering Welshman with a gig in New York. Tomorrow he headlines at the Knitting Factory with Skull Orchard and the 52 voices of the Toronto-based Burlington Welsh Male Chorus. The group is led by Julian Murray, an old college friend and one of the dozens of musicians who were briefly part of the Mekons, the quasi-legendary punk-era band Mr. Langford co-founded in 1976 while attending university in Leeds. The pair became reacquainted a few years ago when Mr. Langford was in Toronto producing a record, and a one-off summit at a Chicago Celtic music festival led to occasional collaborations.

“I’m cheating,” Mr. Langford said. “It looks like I’m flying people around the country. They’re actually in New York performing with [the Welsh opera singer] Bryn Terfel and they had a day off.” Ah, another Welshman. “I do have an auntie who stalks him. She leaves notes for him at all the great opera houses.”

Mr. Langford’s collection of songs, some of which are inspired by traditional ballads and hymns, began coming together about 10 years ago when he recorded his first solo album, “Skull Orchard.” One day it occurred to him that everything he wrote at the time seemed to be about life in South Wales.

“It was a bit like when you see a frog in a frying pan,” he said. “You don’t really recognize it until it starts heating up.”

Some of the material is dryly comic in tone. In one song, Mr. Langford describes a seaside village where nothing interesting has happened since 1954, when John Huston came to film “Moby Dick.”

“Huston heard there was good fox hunting there,” he said.

The movie, which cast the local populace as extras, now serves as an unintentional documentary. “When you look at the film, the faces of those people are just fantastic. We went through there once with the Mekons and nothing seemed to have happened.”

Newport, where Mr. Langford was born and raised in the mid-1950s, was cosmopolitan by comparison. The shipping industry dictated a local culture that was strongly alcohol-themed, with the kind of thriving nightlife that appeals to men of the sea. But it also made Newport into an international crossroads.

“There were people from Asia, India, people from Mauritius, Seychelles. Big Soviet tankers coming in. Reggae culture,” Mr. Langford said. “There wasn’t racism. The black kids were like the cool kids.”

The idyllic recollection contrasts sharply with other stories Mr. Langford has explored. He also sings about the 1966 Aberfan mining disaster, which killed 144 people when a giant pile of rock extracted from the mine slid down a mountain and obliterated a school, leaving only a few survivors.

“I went to school 20 miles away,” Mr. Langford said. As a child, he went with a friend to visit the memorial site. “It was amazing. The earth was black with coal. We looked at all those graves, hoping that there wouldn’t be one with our actual birthdates. But the dates were pretty close. I was 8 or 9, and it was just unthinkable. It wasn’t like it was somewhere remote and far away — all those little crosses on the hill.”

The gravity of such a tale becomes even more powerful with a chorus, which also gives Mr. Langford occasion to expand his musical range beyond the honky-tonk variations of his rowdy working band, the Waco Brothers.

“We’ll get to do a lot of hymns and patriotic songs,” he said. “There’s one called ‘We Are Still Here.’ You can’t understand a word of it, but it’s very powerful. It’s about how pissed off the Welsh are about the Romans. Still. It’s like they’re saying, ‘We are still here, but where are you?’ The Welsh really know how to harbor a grudge.”

Bukkake of Sound: Smile, it’s Boris!

Dry ice billowed across the main stage at the Knitting Factory back one night in March, bathing the audience in a pale, sepulchral mist. Stacks of amplifiers groaned like lungs caked in black fuzz. Short, choppy guitar shards spat furiously, while thick bass chords oozed beneath the seismic shudder of the drums. Few bands alive make the walls sweat like Boris.

The Japanese trio, which has been gigging in one form or another since 1992, has become more prevalent on the American rock club circuit since the breakthrough success of its 2005 album Pink (Southern Lord). The recording sold about 15,000 copies to the kinds of fans who would not likely be seen at Ozzfest, the annual tour that serves as a summit for everything heavy metal. Indeed, the crowd that jammed into the Knitting Factory this week qualified as more nerdy than diabolical, despite its excess of facial hair. And though there was a semblance of a mosh pit, there also was a sizable young female element to the demographic, savvy and amused, perhaps, to have strayed so far from the L train – the automated artery that pumps hipster blood through the heart of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, America’s capital of the next groovy thing.

But, as is obvious to anyone who has indulged their ears in Pink, or for that matter in last year’s collaboration with the guitarist Michio Kurihara of Ghost, Rainbow, Boris really isn’t a heavy metal band. It’s more accurate to label them “heavy meta.” The outfit’s fluid chemistry and ease with extreme dynamic swerves allow it to deploy stop-on-a-dime transitions that can carry a set list across the universe, from skull-cracking rhythmic assaults to beatific nature reveries laced with sun-dappled psychedelia.

One song off Boris’ brand new album, Smile, illustrates this perfectly: “Buzz In” begins with a 4-year-old child singing a jingle, all giggles and innocence, before lead guitarist Wata cranks in with the über-riffage and the drums start to wallop. Yet, every song Boris performs achieves the same effect. “Flower Sun Rain” bodes some kind of lyrical impressionism, but to get to bassist-vocalist Takeshi’s wistful refrain, you have to submit to extensive feedback, drone and hum, manipulated like the sonic equivalent of a hall of mirrors. The effect is at once ghostly and sincere, ephemeral and emphatic, and in the end it feels as if the singer has invited you to drizzle away with him into a soulful, introspective guitar solo that might have been inspired by the late Funkadelic fret wizard Eddie Hazel.

In the world in general, we’re always moving between beautiful and ugly,” Atsuo, the band’s drummer and driving creative force, said recently. It was the afternoon after the show, and the musician and artist was sitting in the lobby of a hotel on West 94th Street with his young American translator. Thankfully, this skinny white dude was more artful at articulating Japanese idioms and parlance than 98 percent of the interviews I’ve done with musicians who don’t speak romance languages. No need to make every time Suntory time, thank Saint Ozu. Instead, what Atsuo often spoke came across as poetic, occasionally a tad mystifying, and generally edged with the crafty intentions of the unreconstructed Dadaist, dishing up the epigrams. “People say about every album, that it’s a pendulum, swinging between opposites. That’s the reality of life.”

Atsuo, like his bandmates, uses only his first name professionally. Now in his late 30s, he seems to approach Boris as part of a more general ongoing art project, one that extends to visual art and literature, as well as more marketable facets such as the band’s often extravagant collectible record and CD packages and its endless collaborations with peers in Japan (guitarist Keiji Haino, Merzbow) and America (label-mates Sunn O)))). His intensity was calm but deep, as an introductory comment turned into a discussion about the meaning of “ambivalence” in Japanese culture, and how Boris’ pursuit of extremes is a method for questioning a kind of national complacency.

Maybe that’s why the group is so eager to embrace an American audience. “When there is a conversation between two people who have their own unique perspective, what comes out is a synthesis of love,” Atsuo said. As he sat in a deep leather armchair, his fingers fluttered over upturned palms like a spider flexing. His long, jet-black hair was offset by a white suit and white loafers, worn with pinstriped black socks. He scarcely needed the dark sunglasses to complete the effect. “The point of the conversation between Boris and music is to destroy the music,” he continued. “The point of the conversation between Boris and the audience is to destroy the audience’s expectation for what Boris sounds like as they listen to it.”

As a child, Atsuo said, his earliest cultural memories were of musical themes used in cartoons. His favorite was a robot show that usually climaxed with a huge battle. “Every week, there was a fight song,” he said. “And it always had a sense of courageousness, of putting your shoulders up and going forward.” The bandleader also nodded to the 1970s theatrical artist Shuji Terayama, whose shows typically subverted reality. “One of his performances was a performance that you couldn’t see,” Atsuo said. “He made everyone who was coming drink a sedative to fall asleep. He was doing quite dangerous things.”

On the flip side, Atsuo lamented that he hasn’t made much of an impact back home. “Japan doesn’t really understand me,” he said. “Yet.” But pudgy, hairy-faced American guys and their hipster chicklet counterparts? They do. They’ll lick the sweat off those walls.

SXSW: Day Two