Gwenifer Raymond – Last Night I Heard the Dog Star Bark (2025) Review: Gwenifer Raymond explores shadowy, nocturnal guitar tones in this third album, following primitive licks into sci-fi futurism. Her songs alternate between folk-blues rambles and psychedelic raga. In either mode, she sounds more like Jack Rose than anyone else working now — and that’s a very good thing. The Welsh guitarist hammers at her instrument, unleashing a percussive rain of notes that fray and change as they linger. She plays fast and hard and with assurance, whether in the blue-grassy “Cattywomp” or the mystic drone of “Jack Parsons Blues.” And then, just for the beauty of it, she dips into languid lyricism for “Dreams of Rhiannon’s Birds,” letting the notes drip like warm honey, catching the light as they go. Though it’s always hard to tie instrumental music to narrative subjects, Raymond says that she wrote this material while immersed in science fiction, older classics by Phillip K. Dick and Ray Bradbury, as well as pulpy paperbacks she picked up cheap in flea markets. That doesn’t filter into the music itself — I’m not hearing anything technological here—but rather opened her up to the idea of infinity, which runs through drones like “Banjo Players of Aleph One” and “One Day You’ll Lie Here but Everything Will Have Changed,” with its lovely, ghostly arcs of slide. The title track comes very late in the album, and, in some ways encapsulates Raymond’s project of linking very old music to a surreal future. It’s steeped in blues, this track, with its tremulous lines of melody and its twangs that stretch like rubber bands. And yet it also spirals up and out of the confines of the genre, in a whirlwind of notes and ideas that blows the dust away and vaults towards the sky. — dusted Track List: 01-Banjo Players of Aleph One 02-Jack Parsons Blues 03-Champion Ivy 04-Bliws Afon Tâf 05-Bonfire of the Billionaires 06-Dreams of Rhiannon's Birds 07-Last Night I Heard the Dog Star Bark 08-Cattywomp 09-Bleak Night in Rabbit's Wood 10-One Day You'll Lie Here But Everything Will Media Report: Genre: alternative folk Origin: Brighton, UK Format: FLAC Format/Info: Free Lossless Audio Codec Bit rate mode: Variable Channel(s): 2 channels Sampling rate: 44.1 KHz Bit depth: 16 bits Compression mode: Lossless Writing library: libFLAC 1.3.0 (UTC 2013-05-26) Note: If you like the music, support the artist