Album Review: Set Fire to the Stars [Original Motion Picture Soundtrack] by Gruff Rhys

Welsh poet Dylan Thomas arrived in New York City in 1950, and soon set up post at the White Horse Tavern, in Greenwich Village. Some say his ghost still resides there – fitting for Gruff Rhys, who has of late been haunted by Welsh expats in the Americas. Concurrent to tracing the journey of his ancestor John Evans through the Midwest, Rhys recorded this score for the biopic which depicts Thomas’ first week in the New World.

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The velvety, lounge-pop ying to Trent Reznor’s dark, industrial yang, Gruff Rhys here makes a subtle and successful deviation into the world of soundtrack composition. The score for the critically panned 2014 film Set Fire to the Stars, a drama about poet Dylan Thomas’s first week in the US in 1950, which starred Elijah Wood – was created around the same time as Rhys’s concept album American Interior. It possesses the same patterning lightness, soft romance and jazz-inspired style, from the elegance and hushed intimacy of its title track to the Field Music-like acoustic quirks of Log Cabin.

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