Album Review: Koreless, Agor

Everything you need to know about the debut album from Welsh producer Lewis Roberts is revealed in the video to recent single ‘Black Rainbow’. Inspired by the 1974 Allen Clarke folk horror classic Penda’s Fen – imagine a batshit Wanderly Wagon meets The Wicker Man – it features figures in creepy orthopaedic foam rolling down a hill as feral synths clamoured in the background.

Lewis grew up in the countryside and Agor is named after the Welsh for “open”. But bucolic bliss and windswept vistas are in short supply on a record that pings from unsettling to baroque and then circles all the way around again.

Stuttering female vocals on ‘Joy Squad’ have the unnervingly clamouring quality of a chorus of banshee shrieks. Allen lists Elgar as an influence – and on ‘Frozen’ and ‘Shellshock’ quasi-classic flourishes collide in slow motion with a tumult of synthesised angst.

Rural Britain has yielded some of the most discommoding electronica of the past quarter century, whether it be Cornwall’s Richard D James (born in Limerick but raised in Lanner) or Scotland’s Boards of Canada. Now Wales has a gothic horror producer from the sticks to call its own too – and Agor is a chiller you’ll want to stay with all the way to the final jump scare.