Mzylkypop

There have not been many times when listening to music I have shouted eureka. Up until yesterday the last time this happened was 20 years ago when I first heard the Arctic Monkeys demos. Yesterday it occurred again when I heard the latest Mzylkypop album. It leaps out of the speakers and demands you listen to the lyrics and dance at the same time. Main man Michael Somerset Ward writes banging tunes and incisive poetic lyrics. The album is split into two, Threnodies, which means ‘lament’, with the songs sung with gusto by Sylwia Anna Drwal. Then there is the Ad Hocs part with Somerset Ward using an illustrious group of musical friends ranging from David Was, Barry Adamson and local legend Stephen Mallinder of Cabaret Voltaire amongst other to vocalise his lyrics. Amazingly despite the multiple vocalists the album is a seamless piece of work and a fully realised concept album. Each vocalist brings their unique style to the songs and allows the work to constantly refresh as the album progresses. The consistent thread unpinning the work is the quality of the songwriting which is  brought to life by the talented musicians Ward chooses to use. A genuinely groundbreaking and remarkable body of work. – Mark Finnigan, EXPOSED

When Michael Somerset Ward started Mzylkypop, his musical goal was to make his music his way, unfettered by anyone else’s ideas about what music should sound like or how it should be put together. I suppose the name Mzylkypop symbolizes that “go your own way” attitude, appearing unpronounceable to a native English speaker, and not producing any results from Google Translate either. Threnodies and Ad Hocs is the second Mzylkypop release, following Kiedy Wilki Zawyja? from 2021. That title is translatable — it’s Polish for When Do Wolves Howl? Ward’s music is defiantly eclectic, freely blending elements that might be regarded as incompatible by other artists. Overdriven surf-rock crashes into 70s movie soundtrack music, then gets interrupted by a moody Eastern European ballad, only to be swamped by electronic noise, free jazz, and deadpan spoken word. Industrial post-punk, a moody torch-singer waltz, and swampy blues-rock also figure in the mix. As jarring as that may seem from the description, Ward makes it work, aided by a talented set of collaborators: vocalists Sylwia Anna Drwal, Adi Newton, Pete Hope, Stephen Mallinder, Vina Figueroa, and David Was; Ward plays a range of woodwinds along with electronics and keyboards; and more than a dozen other contribute guitar, bass, drums, strings, woodwinds, and keyboards. In preparation for this review, I listened to the first album on Bandcamp, and I would say that on the whole it is more upbeat and less moody than this release, though just as varied. Both are excellent and enjoyable, just with different feelings about them. – Jon Davis, EXPOSÉ http://expose.org/index.php/articles/display/mzylkypop-threnodies-ad-hocs-2.html

Not, of course, strictly a jazz album (although the presence of Matthew Bourne and Martin Archer, for instance, pushes it into jazzier realms) but one that it has been a joy to review. The musical DNA of Sheffield run through this album, with its excursions across dystopian synth-rock. This isn’t surprising given that Mzylkypop is brought to us by Mike Somerset and Charlie Collins (ClockDVA), the incomparable Sylwia Anna Drwal (Mother of Crows, The Vagabonds) to sing most of the songs. The ‘Threnodies’ are a song cycle in which Drwal delivers a wide range of emotions that fully engage listeners and refuses to let release them until the last note has rung out. The album closer, ‘My room’ (not part of this cycle) is bleakly despairing but life-affirming lyrics (and the ways that Blues tunes can be) presented in a musical setting that has the mournful air of a Chopin mazurka, delivered compellingly by Drwal. The Ad hocs are, I guess, the pieces in which friends drop in to add their vocals to the other pieces. Stephen Mallinder (Cabaret Voltaire) intones in his immediately recognisable way some deeply unsettling lyrics (announcing the end of the world) over a bassline that recalls 1980’s clubs. David Was, reading the lyrics of ‘Trophy Wives’, has great fun with disturbing lines that (amongst other things) seems to deconstruct the canard of forcible deportation as the desperate stupidity of a gormless government and its xenophobic lackeys (“Take em back on the plane to the Serengeti Plain.. in a freezer bag ”. But the music is not simply agit-pop against the state-of-the-nation or despair at the end of the world. This picks up on themes from the dystopia that underpinned 2018’s Kiedy Wilki Zawyja?” (“When Will The Wolves Howl?”) which also featured many of the same musicians as this album. On this outing, there are also excursions into Satanism or witchcraft and atheism, which one interprets as joyfully provocative (particularly in the ways that the musicians respond to the themes). – Chris Baber, JAZZ VIEWS https://jazzviews.net/mzylkypop-threnodies-and-ad-hocs/

So beautifully rendered, a thousand years of mastery, every note wrapped in arcane knowledge and haptic artistry. Rich as syrup and brittle as ancient bones. Threnodies and Ad Hocs retaining the same warped, exotic, textures and tones that mark Mzylkypop’s unique collapsed old order: swirling organs, cinematic fabric, dulcimer lines and velvet vocal intimacy which seduce and admonish in equal measure as we get sucked in deeper and deeper into this fearsome whirlpool. Acceleration-Deceleration. A jump start journey through a fearful dark night; hop on board the ghost train ride that exists alongside our current digital simulacra, more real than the cod reality which our blue pill gulp gives us. Slip through the torn curtain into this rat-a-tat, deep bass, new Brechtian world. Dance in delight to this modern nightmare, sing along to the old world’s lament, lift up your skirts and show your colours to what is to come. This is no funereal march but a loud and joyous caterwaul, an affirmation of the soul. – Stephen Mallinder

With the extraordinary “Kiedy Wilki Zawyja?” by MZYLKYPOP, Bad Alchemy’s rediscovery of Discus and the rise of Sheffield to the cult site associated with Martin Archer began. The song and story writer and multi-instrumentalist Michael Somerset Ward is also pure Sheffield, with a history with Floy Joy in the 80s, a soft spot for Captain Beefheart and Kafka (“Kafka Chic”, 2014), and finally the connection to Discus. Threnodies and Ad hocs (DISCUS 171) kicks off with ‘A Blood Red Prayer (to the Angel of Death)’ as a 3-part invocation a cappella. Followed by the Threnodies ‘Witches In These Parts’, ‘Snake Anima’, ‘Spiked’ and the Polish ‘Bez Imienia’, sung by Sylwia Drwal, alternating between cheese-organic, sax-driven rock’n’roll and sensual, self-oblivious downtempo. In between, ‘Future Cartography’ as the first of the ad hocs already heard on “Mzylkypop presents Xzyles” (Do It Thissen Records, 12″, 2019), with a recitative by Adi Newton, the Sheffield veteran and with Clock DVA one of the inspirers. As if from the ashes of Clock DVA, Pete Hope, himself a Sheffield veteran with The Box, grabs the microphone for the choked ‘Far From God’, before Stephen Mallinder of Cabaret Voltaire reveals the roots of the Sheffield spirit on ‘Doomerati’. A million heartbreaks lie beyond the skyline / Bringing subterranea over ground, bassist Benjamin Cockayne commented. The murmuring voice of David Was on ‘Trophy Wives’ completes the autofictional aspect, as Don Was once produced Floy Joy in Detroit. Somerset has mobilized two dozen vocalists and instrumentalists for this, he himself plays Woodwinds, keyboards, percussion and electronics, David Lewin/Simon Lewinski is his right hand on keys, guitar & drums, music that takes you into an infernal bar run by Beefheart and W.S. Burroughs, where Foetus performs, and Mallinder when he announces the end of the world, falls on deaf ears and only fills the dancefloor. Drwal concludes this with ‘My Room’ as a sad, even eerie waltz. – Rigobert Dittmann, BAD ALCHEMY

Second very successful album for Michael Somerset Ward’s project, already with the “historic” Clock DVA and songwriter for the political house Crooked Man. Here the band confirms its dizzying avant pop – more avant than pop – with 23 musicians, including singers and orchestras, mixing Sixties psychedelia, mutant prog, bluesy atmospheres, Afro-American new thing (especially in the solos), bizarre references to vintage crime jazz; the music, as Ward himself says, is here a spectrum of colors assembled, over the years, from abandoned industrial cities. – Guido Michelone https://ilmanifesto.it/gli-ultrasuonati-95

I reviewed this lot’s last album, Kiedy Wilki Zawyja?, which has only grown on me since. This looks to be the second, and hits much of the same strides as the first. Or perhaps not. Where the first was arguably a vehicle for the (very very good) singer Sylwia Anny Drwal, Threnodies And Ad Hocs is perhaps more of a diverse set of tunes. I mean, ‘tunes’ – there’s plenty here that harks back to the morass of ’80s business — “Trophy Wives” sounding like early industrial dub nightmare soundscapes with spoken word interludes, a smidge of Spanish. “Future Cartography” a wee opaque narrative over a jazzy rhythm section doing (I think) fast eigths on the snare with a bass playing fives. No real sign of a structure, but the distinct idea it’s not fully improvised. Drwal takes the vocals for most of the first half of the record, and so we get banging Motown renderings of Northernisms from a Polish singer (“Witches In These Parts”), slow torch songs about some grim business (“Spiked”). Touches of plagal cadences, jazz breakdowns, electronic touches, the kind of choppy songform that might sit next to Canterbury Scene business. Never tasteless, always coherent. There’s a real smorgasboard of players on here – presumably largely pulled from the Discus pool of players, looking at the names: Matthew Bourne, Seth Bennett, Karl D’Silva etc. I imagine Discus is probably better known for the jazz / free business, so Mzyklypop is quite a contrast. Difficult to pin down directly — bits of old pop, bits of industrial, touches of electro-pop, torch songs and the like. Your mum would probably like bits of it and be squirming elsewhere. Depends on your mum, obvs. It’s a wee one too — just shy of forty minutes — so there’s a sense that it’s a cute wee package. I could definitely take a few more Drwal vocals. She’s a vocal teacher (I discovered) and that’s evident — really a top-grade singer with outstanding control. This is strongly in that bracket of “leave ’em wanting more”. As it should be. Najdobziej. – Kev Nickells, FREQ https://freq.org.uk/reviews/mzylkypop-threnodies-and-ad-hocs/

Weird yet most impressive. – Bruce Lee Gallanter, Downtown Music Gallery NYC 

Little has changed in the concept of the project, “Threnodies and Ad hocs” also offers a strange, but catchy mixture of folk, avant-pop, post-punk, jazz rock, electronics and weirdness, which is perhaps a bit more homogeneous and sonorous than on the first album (see “Kiedy Wilki Zawyja?”), and has less folk. Electronic and keyboard sound are sound-determining, sometimes free-format scurrying, sometimes rocking, punk or jazzy rhythmically joined, and sonically expanded by all kinds of corresponding instrumental interludes. In addition, there is the voluminous, but always very pleasant singing of Sylwia Anna Drwal (often in Polish), which, however, is used a little less than on the first album, and various other male or female vocal interludes, now and then also sonorously reciting them. The result is a very colorful mixture of retro new wave, electro jazz, electronic tinkering, art pop, weird prog and free play experiments. The music fluctuates accordingly between almost catchy, but always quite individually instrumented songs, more pithy rock and more formless electronic conglomerates, whereby usually all kinds of blowers each provide their own character. The spirit of the early wave experiments of Clock DVA and Cabaret Voltaire is in here, supplemented by jazz (which smells a little like Canterbury), prog and also airy pop. “Threnodies and Ad hocs” is a very entertaining album with a very unique, certainly progressive mixture that is a lot of fun. Anyone who appreciates densely interwoven genre mixtures of an electronic-experimental character should urgently strike here. – Achim Breiling, BABYBLAUE SEITEN https://www.babyblaue-seiten.de/album_21747.html#oben

Future Cartography is a Great track among other great tracks. It features my long time friend and collaborator Michael Somerset and long time friend and collaborator Stephen Mallinder amongst others , I’d strongly recommend and advise anyone interested in experimental and forward thinking musics to check it out .– Adi Newton, ClockDVA

The second album by Michael Somerset Ward’s Mzylkypop owes much of its magic to the lurid dynamism of Sylwia Anna Drwal’s voice – like Hawkwind’s Bridget Wishart, she embraces fantastic themes with gusto, incanting what sounds like a Polish spell on the ballad “Snake Anima”. Given a chance to revel in melodrama and melancholy, Drwal really gets going. “Bex Imienia” finds her in a register somewhere between beseeching lamentation and agonised vocal fry, and she is haunted by nostalgia on “My Room”, which itself shares the dirgey decay of Japan’s “Nightporter”. Elsewhere, “Future Cartography” is a hardboiled spoken word by Adi Newton in the vein of William S Burroughs – he details a history of electronic music over a background of radio and walkie talkie noise blasts, an anxious drum kit, cool cat double bass runs and a paranoid violin. – Emily Bick, THE WIRE

Mzylkypop ( Miz-ilky-pop) is the brainchild of multi-instrumentalist Michael Somerset from Sheffield, UK. He already released a few albums under this moniker, and Threnodies And Ad Hocs is a new CD, on which he is helped by a lot of guest musicians. Michael himself has a rich musical history as part of the legendary band CLOCK DVA in the 80s, scoring big time with WAS NOT WAS alongside DON WAS, and he wrote world-wide hits for Alison Moyet, Take That and Roisin Murphy. This MZYLYPOP CD is clearly different than the usual DISCUS MUSIC releases, because it offers a more accessible direction, although still experimental. For example the song Witches In These Parts is a wonderful uptempo quirky early 80s orientated powerpop/punkrocker with a new wave touch like SIOUXSIE AND THE BANSHEES meets NINA HAGEN, and the song has a very catchy chorus. Avantgarde 60s influenced Garage Rock is also hearable, which is mainly thanks to the excellent vocals of singer SYLWIA ANNA DRWAL. Just listen to the superb Snake Anima and you will understand what I’m talking about, because this has SHOCKING BLUE kinda similarities, yet with a slightly darker art rock touch as well. So far so good with a couple of great original sounding rock tunes, and thankfully the CD continues with a lot more great material, although it is more experimental than the start of the CD, and it takes a slightly different route combining spoken word, cinematic influences with krautrock orientated passages, which is nevertheless also interesting. Other highlights are Trophy Wives and closing track My Room (a superb piano ballad that is sung really well, ADELE eat your heart out!). Definitely a big surprise and a very diverse sounding album, so go check it out. – STRUTTER’ZINE

Despite the challenging band name and album title, this is an excellent album with a retro 70s psychfolk meets filmscore vibe and, dare I say, NWW-ish production touches sprinkled throughout. Masterfully crafted by Michael Somerset Ward with a host of highly skilled musicians and featuring the alluring and captivating voice of Sylwia Anna Drwal. Highly recommended! – W.A.Davison, IT’S ALL GONE WEIRD

It certainly won’t be the name and the title of the album that will open the doors of popularity to this project that is nothing short of surprising, but then again the music contained in this album is also elusive like few others, putting even the most imaginative of pop taxonomists to the test. The moniker Mzylkypop identifies a project by Michael Ronald Somerset Ward, already herded into some incarnation of Clock DVA, who for the occasion delivers some vocal featuring to people like Adi Newton, Stephen Mallinder and even David Was, founder of Was Not Was and producer with an unassailable history (with his more famous partner Don Was he even produced Dylan!) and introduces to the world a certain Sylwia Anna Drwal, a truly remarkable singer completely unknown to me. Reported to me with motivated enthusiasm by Polychron Plus and knowing the musical history of the whole group well, I was sure that it was an essentially electronic album and when I stuck the CD in the player the disorientation was radical: what is this stuff? After a sort of invocation to Satan in reverse, a killer bass line starts with a decidedly rock drive, voice and drums come in and you are catapulted into an irresistible pop song with a strong sixties flavour, almost Phil Spector or Lee Hazlewood, but as if pierced by a swarm of sound debris that enters and exits the mix and that seems to emerge from a black and muddy backdrop (characteristic of the whole album). An apparently incongruous, beautiful chorus interrupts the saraband for a few seconds which then resumes Dionysian, the bass that pumps, a sax that screams and the guitar that deviates rock. At the end of the first piece you are already stuck, even if you don’t understand why. The second piece confirms the rockish climate, a mid-tempo with Morricone-esque guitar, but always immersed in this dark and modernist broth, a beautiful song, graced by Drwal’s interpretation, whose voice rises chanting evoking the ghost of Grace Slick. Then, as if nothing had happened, we move on to a sort of tribal and kicking jazz from the urban slums, disfigured by bleeps and sonic dirt, on which Adi Newton builds one of his dark narratives: we are in areas already touched in some pieces by the first Clock DVA, even if the feeling is more “Live” and played, or even in those of Barry Adamson’s “Moss side story”. The point is that this is also a fantastic piece. I could tell you all about the album, song by song, but I’ll just say that from this swarm of waste and interferences of all kinds, killer pieces continue to emerge throughout the album: sumptuous dark ballads, shadowy technopop simulacra and compositions that are really difficult to frame, like the spectacular song sung by Mallinder. It’s an album in which genres and styles that are very distant from each other converge, and yet you never get the feeling of a patchwork or a compilation, everything sounds homogeneous and perfectly in focus.
What a strange, very strange, great album.” – Michele Meozzi