This week I discovered a review of one of my reviews (bear with me, this is totally relevant): someone had commented underneath the piece and expressed appreciation. Have you, dear reader, any idea how rare that is? Sure, musicians’ lives are terrible hard, swaggering around the indie-rock circuit like outlaws, hopped up on adulation, gorging themselves on hummus ‘n’ pitta riders, then nipping into a soundbooth for half an hour every couple of years to seal the setlist on to cylinder – but did you ever consider that the real work, your actual struggle, is that faced by the music writer, alone, perhaps in a draughty garret, with only the void for company, trying to decipher the resulting recordings, exegete, expound, and conjure explicatory clauses into life? No, of course you didn’t: you only think of yourself.
I’m pleased to report, therefore, that Chroma’s debut album, ‘Ask For Angela’, is worth it: worth your time, and worth the wait for the fanbase the band have built over the last seven-ish years of occasional single/EP releases interspersed with pandemic-related career delays. Even in the context of the currently abundant grassroots UK music scene Chroma cut through, with a record that crucially isn’t just good, but great; not just great but important. They made us an album we can’t refuse.
I want to do two main things with this review: not compare Chroma to other female-fronted Welsh indie bands, and not speculate on their musical influences. Oh – a third aim: not to overexplain the album with unnecessary spoilers: you should buy it asap and hear for yourself. But for the uninitiated I should set the scene, so: LOUD WOMEN Fest 2022 alumnus Chroma are a DIY alternative rock trio from Rhondda Cynon Taf, South Wales, via Pontypridd and Cardiff. They present a little like they might play some kind of indiepop-grrrl-grunge but their sound is far, far heavier due to a combination of Zac Mather’s pulverising drumming, Liam ‘Bev’ Bevan’s metallic pedal-driven, pickup-modified bass guitar and Katie Hall’s fierce, searing, keening vocals, for whom this record stakes a claim as being simply one of the.most.powerful singers you’ll currently see and hear anywhere in this disunited kingdom.
It’s chastening to consider that someone in their twenties at this juncture has known nothing but austerity and war-on-terror, with the brief period of cultural optimism we associate with Britpop being as far distant now as the Swinging Sixties were to the late 80s/early 90s ‘jilted generation’. It’s little wonder that this zeitgeist should find expression in the music of the period and, sure enough, this album is steeped in references to poverty, crises, mental health, regional decline, toxic masculinity, and violence; the latter sometimes metaphorical, sometimes not.
But before I give the impression that Chroma are some kind of chore to listen to, be assured that this LP rocks the-fuck-out, launching a series of aural brickbats at the unprepared listener, from the catchy-as hell opener ‘Don’t Wanna Go Out’, and the propulsive, re-recorded-from-the-7” ‘Girls Talk’ to bangers like ‘I Wanna Be Where You Are’, ‘Bombs Away’ and the TERF-defying ‘Woman To Woman’. Mid-paced songs such as ‘Don’t Mind Me’, ‘Head In Transit’, ‘Look At Me’, and slower track ”Life’s A Bitch’ lower the tempo but none of the ferocity. It’s an exhilarating and serious record. Ask For Angela is fun, and you can and no doubt will mosh to it, but it carries a hell of a weight: a heavy album. It delivers that relentless-yet-tuneful wall-of-sound that Nova Twins do so well, it has an almost Petrol Girls level of pummelling intensity but – and I suppose this is what makes Chroma seem like more of a rock than a punk group – Katie is never not singing and never merely shouting these anthems of defiance.
Not defiance in some vapid ‘we will rock you’ kind of way, nor either in a superficial ‘we’re not gonna take it’-style revo cosplay- in fact Chroma seem to instead be saying ‘we probably are gonna take it, for the foreseeable’ – so the least we can bloody do is fix all this interpersonal stuff that stops us from struggling alongside – rather than against – each other.
Nowhere is that message clearer than on the deeply moving, impressively epic closing track ‘Over The Hill’ with its key lyric “I’ve got big plans to go nowhere, and try to figure it out.” But that’s not my favourite moment on the album. There’s an excellent line in the middle of ‘Girls Talk’: “I don’t worry about heart disease, because you’re dead set on killing me” – but that’s not my favourite either. No, my favourite moment on this earworm-laden longplayer, and possibly this resonates from having watched too much news recently, comes on ‘Look At Me’, where Katie sings: “You take the left, and then the right, then you sidestep, and you’ll burn the world ’til there’s nothing left – let’s go!” as the band launch dynamically into a crescendo. Something about that moment perfectly encapsulates Ask For Angela‘s confident combination of engaged and engaging, and having had this record on repeat since its release I can’t wait to hear what Chroma do next.
Ask For Angela is out now on Alcopop! Records.