Songdog

Songdog channels the abundant creative energies of Lyndon Morgans, the Welsh playwright, novelist, and songwriter whose output has proven remarkably consistent. Their fusion of pop noir and alt country set the band apart as one of the freshest arrivals on the British music landscape at the start of the new millennium. Morgans launched his initial efforts from Blackwood, his hometown in southern Wales, before heading to London in search of a recording agreement. Early experiments appeared under the Jellymoulds banner.

In 1998 he assembled Songdog with Karl Woodward on guitar—another Blackwood native—plus Dave Paterson on drums and Robert Lesniewski on keyboards. After signing to Zara Records, the group delivered its first studio release, the EP Cold Coffee & Ava Gardner, in July 2000. Drawing from the incisive humor and romantic sensibility of songwriting forebears such as Jacques Brel and Tom Waits, the EP revealed Morgans’ singular vocal timbre and densely literary approach to lyric craft.

The Way Of The World carried those thematic threads into full-length form, allowing his songwriting imagination to scale new peaks on standout cuts ‘I Love My Angel’s Plastic Wings’ and ‘Lazarus In Flames’. Now operating as a trio, Songdog shifted to the Evangeline label for the 2003 album Haiku. Numbers such as ‘She Hangs In The Dark Like A Saint In A Cathedral’, ‘The Girl On The Escalator At HMV’, and ‘Hat-Check Girl’ supplied additional proof of Morgans’ biting wit and teeming inventive powers.