his compilation, put together in part by Gruff Rhys of Super Furry Animals, contains music that’s Welsh, rare but not beat, but what sane person could turn down the chance to use a pun as bad as that, or the chance to have a cover featuring a luvverly looking slice of the real Welsh rarebit? No one.

What Welsh Rare Beat does compile is music from the self-described, but let’s believe them, leading Welsh record company, Sain. Whilst their current releases mostly consist of Aled Jones, Bryn Terfel, and male voice choirs, in the seventies they were releasing seriously odd, uncommercial stuff (and male voice choirs) in quantity. The reason for this is that the Sain label had the didactic purpose of supporting the then resurgent Welsh nationalism by releasing records entirely in the Welsh language. I love music from all over the world, from Europe, Africa and the Americas, and despite embarrassingly poor foreign language skills can often tease out at least a little of the verbal content of a song. It’s disconcerting to listen to music that was performed a few hundred miles away from where I live and understand absolutely none of the words, with the entire vocal flow sometimes feeling more alien to me than a Bollywood soundtrack.

But it’s also invigorating to sometimes feel like a stranger in one’s own country, and this feeling of uncertainty also matches the music. Music that’s defined by what it isn’t quite; not quite psych, progressive, or folk rock, not in their neatly codified senses, but almost. The music is often heavily rhythmically motivated, enough to draw attention from the crate-digging crowd, but it’s obviously not gonna be funk and it’ll rarely rock a dance floor. Like the seventies British library music that it sometimes resembles this is music that constantly wriggles just free of being pinned down and ordered into a taxonomy.

“Calan Gaeaf” by Sain supergroup Edward H. Dafis mixes clonky seventies hard rock with upfront Moog in a manner suggesting stoners demo-ing a Chinn and Chapman glam b-side. They were the favourite band of a six-year-old Gruff Rhys and inferences may be correctly drawn. Meic Stevens, the only well known (‘well known’) name featured, testifies roughly over Gainsbourg-like heavy and funky bass and drums and submerged wah-fuzz on one of his tracks. On the other he leads the valleys in song as part of a breezy organ and handclap jam that couldn’t be further from the stolid choral singing that Welsh music is normally associated with.

Exquisite female voices are well featured here, pure and powerful because of the way they are able to rein themselves in, because of the notes that they don’t sing. Anyone who has been impressed by Vashti Bunyan, early Steeleye Span or other touchstones of the wyrd-folk resurgence has a duty to check out this CD as Eleri Jones and Heather Jones will soon become new favourites. Every time I listen to this compilation I have a new favoured track, or something else I fixate on for the first time, whether it’s the way the close mic’ed and tender sounding male voice eventually counters the female voice on “Dyddiau Dwys” or the sheer propulsion of the splintered tabla and acoustic guitar on Huw Jones’ “Dwr.” All of the 25 tracks featured here are uniformly good—all killer, no filler—and the whole compilation hangs together exceptionally well, as if it was always supposed to—thanks to Sain’s in-house producer Hefin Elis there’s a unity of sound throughout, open, unfussy, and unforced, lending itself to repeated listening.

A compilation of obscure politically motivated Welsh music might sound like a chore in the abstract but it’s a joy in practice; this compilation shows that it’s amazing what can still be excavated even from right under everyone’s nose. Excellently packaged and with informative and evocative sleeve notes, this just might be the best reissue of the year.