Like girl groups, rockabilly and “spirit of ’77″ three chord punk, surf rock is one of those styles that refuses to die. Invented in the early 60s, the instrumental form led by twangy, reverbed fast picked guitars comes back into cool provenance every so often – think of the concerted 90s influence of Dick Dale’s Pulp Fiction aided revival, Joey Santiago’s cresting solos for Pixies, or cult sci-fi oddballs Man Or Astro-Man?

2010 seems to be developing something of a surf sideline too, with the warm coastline haze of Best Coast and Wavves (Nathan Williams declaring himself ‘King Of The Beach’, lest we forget), the nostalgic rock’n’roll surf-garage of Spectrals, and now from the climes of the not exactly Florida-like Snowdonia National Park come Y Niwl. Two guitars, no vocals, titles in Welsh and an adherence to the values laid down by Dale, the Ventures and the Surfaris.

It’s clear from the off that they know what they’re dealing with, ‘Undegpump’ setting off in high gear with a racing riff evolving into metronomic, ride cymbal heavy drumming and a carefully twanging solo, reeking of California. Throughout there’s almost heroic little runs up the fretboard, picking out tremelo-friendly, evocatively undulating parts riding just under the cresting rhythm, just sounding spot on. ‘Undegpedwar’ lifts its guitar sound from the offcuts left round the back of Joe Meek’s infamous Holloway Road home studio and sounds like something taken straight from experimental Technicolor Movietone surfing footage. Even the echo around ‘Wyth’ sounds sepia-tinged.

Inevitably for an entirely instrumental album fixating purely on one specific spot in rock’n’roll history, it doesn’t all work as it should. A run of slower tracks in the second half (of what’s not exactly a drawn out record at 28 and a half minutes long) struggle to find a way to remain entirely interesting, ‘Pedwar’ finds you can’t out-Duane Eddy the Duane Eddy spy guitar template, and the Farfisa organ sound makes a not unexpected appearance on ‘Deg’, bringing a certain amount of inherent retro cool but not adding a great deal of vim to its more garage orientated cuts. One really shouldn’t be thinking of the Inspiral Carpets, but…

That said, when it works, it works about as well as conjuring up the breaking sunshine and audio reconstruction of riding the waves that the best surf instrumentals are supposed to. Free from distortion, musicianly egotism or extraneous instrumentation there’s nothing hipster about it, merely good time recreation of something that rarely fails at its peak to get some sort of response.