Welsh electronic musician and producer Kelly Lee Owens took an unusual step with the release of Inner Song, her second album and the follow up to 2017’s self-titled debut album which received widespread critical acclaim. With the Coronavirus pandemic looming large over us all, she chose to delay the release of her new album as a gesture of solidarity with record stores that had been forced to shut their doors.

Owens worked in record stores in London herself after leaving her job as a nurse in Manchester and relocating to the capital to pursue a career in music. After plugging away with a band, she decided to change direction, left the group behind, and began experimenting with electro sounds, culminating in her wonderful debut LP.

Curiously, Inner Song opens with a Radiohead cover: Arpeggi is a delicious and other worldly instrumental reimagining of Weird Fishes/Arpeggi from the Oxfordshire band’s 2007 album In Rainbows. Owens takes the original’s looping riffs and compresses them, creating a surreal but wonderful intro to the album that draws you in.

On continues that dreamy theme, before exploding into a pulsating floor-filler, albeit one that captures the pain and the optimism of the end of a relationship and the new possibilities its demise yields, while Melt! sees Owens produce an out and out techno monster.

Jeanette is a tribute to her nana, who sadly passed away last year and was a big supporter of Owens’ music. It’s a beautiful homage, a soaring panorama of a track that is perhaps the album’s high point. The incredible Corner Of My Sky, a near eight-minute fusion of spoken-word poetry and haunting beats featuring fellow Welsh musician and former Velvet Undergroud star John Cale, offers some strong competition to the claim though, with its slow-build tension and lyrics that embody their shared homeland.

Inner Song though is a remarkable body of work through, by various turns low-key and beautifully heartfelt and also surging and high-octane. Owens deserves huge credit for cramming so much into one album, and doing it all so well.

Watch the official video for Melt! here.

Inner Song tracklist:

1. Arpeggi

2. On

3. Melt!

4. Re-Wild

5. Jeanette

6. L.I.N.E.

7. Corner Of My Sky (feautring John Cale)

8. Night

9. Flow

10. Wake-Up

 electro-pop 

Author: Joe Sharratt

Joe Sharratt is a writer and journalist based in the UK covering music, literature, sport, and travel.