“YOUR heart is in the revolution. Remember that when you’re sat in your office,” Gwenno Saunders implores a packed-out venue.

That’s not a utopian statement of a detached career artist but a survival technique passed on by this former office worker-turned-agitator.

This gig’s all about her first solo album Y Dydd Olaf (The Last Day), exclusively in Welsh and Cornish, but with handy translations online for fans not fluent in either language.

Even so, her dream-like synth sounds mean that listeners need not necessarily be able to recite the lyrics to connect with her music.

And she does provide a summary of Chwyldro (Revolution) for a largely English audience in the London venue. “It’s actually about bad town planning,” she laments in reference to the “development” of Cardiff’s formerly working-class Tiger Bay docks.

Such pre-song seminars aren’t unusual for Welsh-language artists. Gruff Rhys has been known to stop halfway through a song to explain its contents or hold up huge placards bearing lyrics.

Fratolish Hiang Perpeshki — the title of what is arguably the album’s most popular track — means nothing in any language.
The electro pop track, which grows in urgency, is “a song to dance to at the end of the world,” she says.

Radical themes run through the album’s eight tracks, as on Patriarchaeth (Patriarchy) and Calon Peiriant (The Heart of the Machine).

Unsurprisingly, perhaps, she reveals later that she is a long-time Morning Star reader — her mum always bought it.

Eight months pregnant, she performs with energy and then puts a shift in selling her merchandise.

A standard bearer for true cultural diversity, socialism and synth is on the rise. Don’t miss.

- Y Dydd Olaf is available on Heavenly Records.

Review by Luke James