search and destroy: gorky's zygotic mynci

The Girl I've Always Known; Pentref Wrth Y Mor; Diamond Dew; The Summer's Been Good From the Start...so many lovely songs.

I had this dream again last night, for the first time in years and it scared the crap out of me.

Erm, yeah. GZM. They have a song called "A Game Of EYES!!!!!" which also scares the crap out of me.

I'd say Barafundle 's their bestest.
And Gorky 5 the piss-poorest.

Search:
1. Hush The Warmth
2. The Game Of Eyes
3. Can Megan
4. Murder Ballad
5. Spanish Dance Troupe
6. Catrin
7. Diamond Dew/Barafundle Bumbler/Starmoonsun/Patio Song (they have to be heard in order for some reason)
8. Dyle Fi
9. If Fingers Were Xylophones
10. Queen of Georgia
11. Blood Chant
12. Stood On Gold

I still don't know what to make of their latest album - the first half is great but the second is a bit boring and the whole thing is lacking in weirdness. Shit cover too.

what's "20" like?

What should I get?

Gorky 5 - I always imagine the band being trapped in one of those snowglobes. Lots of grandiose swirling ballads. A lot of people don't like it so much because it was such a step away from Barafundle but in it's defense it does have some excellent moments, among them "Sweet Johnny", "Dyle Fi", "Catrin" and the remarkable "Hush The Warmth".

Spanish Dance Troupe - A slight return to their odder days. I'd say this was their most like Barafundle but not exactly. "Faraway Eyes" reminds me of Cockney Rebel in a weird way and the title track is awesome. I'd say this is one of their strongest later albums.

The Blue Trees - Many peoples favourites but not mine. It's a live in the studio acoustic mini album. It's not awful by any means, just a bit short and straightforward for me. "Face Like Summer" and their version of "Fresher Than The Sweetness In Water" are both awesome.

How I Long To Feel That Summer In My Heart - I was disappointed by this one at first but in recent months it's become one of my all-time favourites. Tim, I think you'd like "Can Megan" off of this one as it's kind of similar to "Starmoonsun". Like Gorky 5, this album takes a bit of adjusting to as it's a totally different sound and structure to the other albums. The songs are mostly warm very well produced pop/folk ballads but there is a certain prog-iness to them. The title track for instance is based on a very simple idea that builds and builds and suddenly transforms and blossoms right at it's peak.

Sleep/Holiday - Another one which I've had since last year but have had trouble with. I can't give it classic status just yet but again there are some rated tunes on here. The prog element of the last album is raised here - there are a lot of long tracks and this disquieting stillness to the whole thing. Tracks like "Pretty As A Bee" just seem to hang there like leaves waiting to fall from trees. I'd say it's more of a mood/ambient album than anything else and apart from the rather irritating "Mow The Lawn", should be treated as such.

Over all I'd say that the quintessential Gorky's is "Barafundle". As someone said way upthread, it is where the old and new style Gorkys meet. They'd perfected their craziness and were dabbling in pop and balladeering too. I like the "Bwyd Time" album a lot as well.
Apart from "Barafundle", all the albums are well worth checking out without exception. I can't really rate one over the other as they're all very different and equally deserving.

The Gorkys are famous for mentioning the seasons in their later albums and I'd go so far as to assign a month of the year to each one. Let's do it just for fun:

Barafundle: April
Gorky 5: January
Spanish Dance Troupe: September
How I Long: July
Sleep / Holiday: November

Agree?

Alba, I'm glad there's been a spate of Groky threads cos it's made me listen to them loads recently and I think I'm starting to realise they could well be up there with Pavement, Blur and the Boo Radleys as one of my favourite bands.

I even went so far as to burn off a CD-R of the best of their non-weird chillout "How I Long"/"Dyle Fi"-style ballads and they've been the recent soundtrack to my sunny lunchbreaks.

Er, I didn't mean "Apart from" - I meant "As well as"

Richard from the band has a country-rock sideproject which I saw the weekend before last. It was pretty nice. Dunno if they've recorded anything

I should note that my renewed interest in GZM was inspired by realising that every time I was disappointed by some highly rated prog/psych/folk album it was because I wished it was more like Barafundle.

PERFECT!

Introducing Gorky's Zygotic Mynci is one of the best compilations I have ever heard. So perfectly sequenced that it's hard to believe the songs weren't actually recorded for this end. Search that.

They were very good at that Peel thing.

Euros Childs would have been about 20 when Bwyd Time was released. The last Gorky's LP (Sleep/Holiday) was released long before he turned 30.

And he's released nothing of note since. :(

I saw Gorky's live in '97 and thought they were great, then saw them again a couple of years later and thought they were shit. Prime example of "I only like the early stuff" for me unfortunately - I like most of their stuff up to and including Bwyd Time. Barafundle and Gorky 5 are OKish in parts I suppose although haven't listened to either in years. I think Spanish Dance Troupe was the contemporary album for the 2nd time I saw them so never listened to it, they seemed to go from this awesome psychedelic racket to strummy acoustic boredom.

Some of their prettiest songs are on Gorky 5 and Spanish Dance Troupe!

I guess I don't like their pretty songs...

I really like the pretty stuff, but I also love the weird, psychedelic Gorky's. The weirdness seemed to end with John Lawrence's departure...

euros really seems to have followed kevin ayers' career path post gorky's.

I'm impressed that they were all listening to Soft Machine in their teens in the pre-Napster early '90s. It wouldn't be as unusual now, but back in the early '90s it was very unusual.

Hippie parents?

euros really seems to have followed kevin ayers' career path post gorky's.

Bit unfair on Kevin Ayers tbh.

I should look into the Kevin Ayers/Canterbury Scene a bit more. I love this sort of whimsical / psychedelic stuff in general so I can't believe it's taken this long. Is there a good primer or a good album to start with?

Probably his first solo album. I'm think there's been some good KA comps over the years.

Though I seem to remember that Gorkys were particularly fond of "Shooting at the Moon".

The only post-Barafundle GZM album I've heard is The Blue Trees (which I quite liked), I should remedy that. My favourite by far though is that collection of the early EPs.

Love Gorky's. I can really appreciate and at times adore the early weirdness ('The Game of Eyes' is as cool as it is insane and scary) but I'm mostly fond of the pretty stuff. I think that Spanish Dance Troupe is my favourite album (title track probably fave song, along with non-album single 'Young Girls & Happy Endings'). There's great songs to be found throughout their discography, for instance 'Frozen Smile' of Gorky 5 is gorgeous.
Sleep/Holiday is my least fave, I find it rather boring.

Euros solo: I have 'Chops' and 'Miracle Inn', both are nice, there's a particular highlight in the title track of Miracle Inn.

I like the Jonny album a lot too, 'Candyfloss' and 'You Was Me' are excellent.

I remember Gorky 5 getting a bit of flack back in the day. I'm listening to it now and I think it's gorgeous, though a little depressing. It's also one of the only Gorky's albums to feature Euros screaming.

"Sweet Johnny" is one of those aforementioned kind of annoying rockers, though.

I just did a look at Discogs 'cos I realized the voice on a couple tracks didn't sound like Euros, and I found out John Lawrence (the proggy lad up above) did some lead vocals on Gorky 5. I actually really like his voice on this album.

Always wondered why Richard James didn't sing his own song on Barafundle (Sometimes The Father Is The Sun) but always did otherwise

John Lawrence frequently sang lead vocals on GZM songs throught his stint with the band. He wrote 'Softly', 'Not Yet' and 'Tsunami' on Gorky 5. Spanish Dance Troupe is the last LP with Lawrence.

Hippie parents?

euros really seems to have followed kevin ayers' career path post gorky's.

Bit unfair on Kevin Ayers tbh.

― Punnet of the Grapes (Tom D.)

post-'74? i love both ayers and euros, but they both seem to me to be sort of wanderers.

Kevin was definitely erratic, but that's almost part of who he was. I've said it here before but I like all of his albums up to and including "That's What You Get Babe", "Yes We Have No Mañanas" is one of his best albums.

You know I completely forgot I got this last year -- and maybe I've never actually listened to it yet! Free download, 32 bands, at least some of them have to be good:

https://recordiauprin.bandcamp.com/album/iechyd-da-a-tribute-to-gorkys-zygotic-mynci

The "Merched Yn Neud Gwallt Eu Gilydd" cover is by Kliph Scurlock, formerly of The Flaming Lips. He's been involved in like every major Welsh band/artist's thing for the past 2 or 3 years.

i liked the version of "catrin" by the gentle good.

Where there any Lawrence compositions recorded for Spanish Dance Troupe which didn't make the cut after he left the band?

I remember even at the time people were saying "Oh they were better with John Lawrence in the band", even though they had already largely changed direction by Gorky 5

I'm not sure, but I'd guess not. Spanish Dance Troupe was already "in the can" by the time Lawrence left. There was a five month gap between the album being completed and it being released (which is actually pretty standard) and Lawrence left during this period.

Arguably, they were already starting to change direction on Barafundle, which increasingly seems to me to be both a "transitional" record and their most focused work.

Well, of all the solo careers, his is by far the absolute worst, so I'm not sure what did or didn't happen, but I don't think he would've done the band any good in the end.

Richard James is probably the blandest, but he has some pleasant highs.

Euros veers too far into kitsch on almost all of his albums, and the experimental ones are total busts IMO. I think he just rushes his songwriting.

I think with Gorky's it was basically the usual case of the band being greater than the sum of their parts. I reckon if they all collaborated as they did back in the early days of Gorky's, they could come up with something really good.

I've always wondered if perhaps John had contributed some songs to what ended up as SDT because he's completely absent from the writing credits, which seemed otherwise unusual as he was all over the others, to the extent of having three solo compositions on Gorky 5.

Yeah, I always found that unusual too, given that he didn't leave the band until after the LP was completed... it's hard to say what happened there. Either he was going through a dry spell as a songwriter, or he had songs and the band didn't record them for whatever reason - either they didn't fit, or he'd already thought about doing solo stuff. It's hard to say, because not much has really been said about Lawrence's departure.

see, SDT is overall a 'weirder' album than Gorky 5 so the idea that he was the experimental guy sdoesnt really float

and his stuff on Gorky 5 is about the most straightforward he ever did

I listened to Sleep/Holiday recently because of this thread - haven't listened to it for years, but was surprised to find I only dislike 3 songs on it.

Another year, another substandard Euros Childs album. Anyone listen to 'House Arrest' yet?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VNI0WFeiZHI

*sigh*

Those Gorkys albums still remain painfully unaffordable and practically non-existent in LP form. Who can fix this? Also Richard James put out a moody instrumental (synth?) album which I scanned through on bandcamp.

It's near criminal that you can't hear Bwyd Time anywhere other than YouTube. I'd love a reissue

I wonder if there'd be lots of interesting unreleased stuff that could be used for expanded versions. Euros has certainly be very prolific as a solo artist.

*been very prolific

i’ve loved a lot of those Euros albums - his recent all covers album was especially good. It’s just prohibitively expensive to order the LPs in the states.