ALBUM REVIEW: Plant by Peiriant

Where Dychwelyd found Peiriant contemplating their return to Cymru, Plant (children in Gymraeg) finds them navigating the sometimes heavy and beautiful friction of raising a family in an uncertain world. Considered to be a sequel to their previous album, Plant (Feb 27th) moves away from the warmth of home and towards the complicated reality of what it means to protect something small in a landscape that is ever shifting.

In their wordless dialogue, Rose Linn-Pearl’s violin and Dan Linn-Pearl’s guitar become their voices that are guided by the grounding electronics that offer a foundation to the bending sounds of their strings. “Pwls” is a piece that feels shadowed and persistent, as if something is following just out of sight. It goes hauntingly hard by the duo’s standard. The grit is balanced by lightness though. While “Song In Parts” is a testing of the air where the instruments react to every micro-shift in each other’s delivery, “Wrth Y Bwrdd”, has a sense of weightlessness and a feeling of momentum and freedom of a child running through a field without a care for the world left behind.

Given the album’s title, the energy in “Velfed” feels like fear that a parent may carry for their children. It’s heavy, thick, and protective. Closer “Pedair Cadair” serves as a soundtrack to the stillness of evening, the sound of watching loved ones exist in a state of total freedom. The earlier tensions of the record don’t necessarily vanish, but they soften into a state of acceptance. It’s the sense of knowing that as parents you do your best for your children, protect them as much as you can, but that they still have to live and experience the world for themselves. It’s where an album like Plant becomes a quiet refuge to the sound of a window being latched shut at sunset and here the only thing left to do is listen to the heartbeat of the house.

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Catch Peiriant live in March