CONCERT REVIEW: Gorky's Zygotic Mynci, Mercury Lounge, New York City
- Wilson Neate
In a recent interview, Gorky's front man Euros Childs joked that it was only a matter of time before someone issued a compilation entitled The Best Welsh Album in the World . . . Ever! in order to cash in on the current popularity of bands from Cymru. On this fictional album, as Childs conceived it, you'd find the likes of The Alarm, Budgie, John Cale, Tom Jones, Man, and Shirley Bassey, acts who until 10 years ago made up the canon of Welsh popular music, at least in the minds of most people on the English side of the Severn Bridge. Of course, this hypothetical album would also include representatives of the recent generation of Welsh groups that have turned out to be some of the hottest properties in British rock and pop today.
But although Gorky's Zygotic Mynci are often mentioned in the same breath as Stereophonics, Super Furry Animals, Catatonia and the Manic Street Preachers, owing to their geographical origin, the similarities between Gorky's and their fellow Welsh groups pretty much end there.
While the rest of the pack are fine bands, their songs do the standard work of pop, allowing listeners to slot themselves into a universal narrative. Theirs is a kind of "your name here" approach with very little in the music that generates a regional sense of place or that roots them in the specific environment of Wales--not that I'm suggesting they have any responsibility to do so. At the same time, however, bands such as the Manics certainly do identify themselves in national terms and make much of "being Welsh," albeit in interviews or via onstage flag-waving.
With Gorky's on the other hand--on record, in performance and in interview--there's an absence of nationalist rhetoric and yet their music conveys a unique sense of time, place and identity. Listening to Gorky's isn't a passive, generic pop experience. Rather, it's an active encounter with otherness in which you enter what Tom Cox of The Guardian has called "Gorkyworld," a place of "rolling hills surmounted by bearded wizards playing flutes, schoolbound children dropping lunchboxes as they hurdle streams, picnics on windswept beaches, and mystical medieval roots."
In these days of devolution and of popular nationalist and regionalist sentiment in Great Britain, however, questions have been raised as to whether the landscape of Gorky's music is an authentic representation of Wales. Such concerns display an overly simple view of national identity and the terms of its cultural representation. Gorky's don't beat us over the head with an essentialized "Welshness"--whatever that may be--in terms that might just reproduce stereotypes and cliches. And interestingly, while the generic rock of some of the other Welsh bands--flag-waving notwithstanding--has tended to abolish a sense of place and a fixed, regional identity in favor of an anonymous urban sensibility, Gorky's music enagages in a more complex process and suggests more useful and progressive notions of identity and community.
The vision communicated by the rich and allusive textures of their sound is far from quaint regionalism. Of course it's grounded in the geographical, historical and cultural contexts of its creation but it also derives from other places and times. The identity of their music is happily contradictory, at once rooted in Wales and at the same time produced by multiple incorporations of otherness. They create "Gorkyworld" not only by drawing on the cultural and musical traditions of their own region--as well as its language--but also by visiting other places and times: the English folk tradition, the 70s art rock of the Canterbury scene, the swinging London of early British psychedelia, the 70s Krautrock of Faust, the barking mad Mojave desert of Captain Beefheart, the American South of country music, and the Southern California of the Beach Boys.
Owing to its hybrid pastiche of forms, their music attests to a postmodern sense of self and community, one that reveals the limited terms of the traditional conceptualizations of belonging and identification allowed by nationalist ideologies. "Gorkyworld" and its inhabitants are multifaceted as opposed to monolithic; they are at once local and global, rooted and shifting. While Gorky's sense of belonging, identity and place may stem from a crossing of borders, it never ceases to be Welsh. Their Welshness simply accommodates heterogeneity, process and transformation and is defined by more than language, a political stance or acceptable, fixed cultural tropes. This hybrid identity becomes brilliantly clear in a single moment at the end of the song "Spanish Dance Troupe" as Childs, his Welsh accent foregrounded, playfully poaches a Beach Boys lyric.
"Good evening, we're Gorky's Zygotic Mynci from Wales in Great Britain" were Euros Childs's words of salutation to a packed Mercury Lounge. And that was pretty much all that Childs said last night, apart from repeatedly thanking us and giving us the thumbs up. But then there was no need to say anything else, no need for banter or shtick--the music spoke for itself.
The last 18 months or so haven't been easy for the band from Pembrokeshire. During the sessions for Gorky 5, guitarist John Lawrence decided to call it quits, then they were dropped by Mercury in late 1998--halfway through a tour--and subsequently they even had to self-finance the recording of their next album. Fortunately, they were signed by Mantra records and Spanish Dance Troupe was released in October.
Much like Spanish Dance Troupe, which clocks in at a slim 37 minutes, their set was brief by late 90s standards, lasting only 45 minutes. But that's perfectly OK given that their sound is, after all, a beautiful pastiche of music from a time when albums and performances were generally shorter than they are today.
When you listen to Gorky's, you know you've heard what they're doing somewhere before but at the same time you haven't. Rather than imitate, they take the shape and feeling of earlier music and repackage it in their own way. Spanish Dance Troupe continues to revisit the best of British folk and progressive rock of the late 60s and early 70s, albeit with the addition of a distinct country twang. Last night's performance of songs like "Desolation Blues," "She Lives on a Mountain," "Faraway Eyes" and "Over and Out" showcased the best of the new album and its hybrid renderings.
The linchpin last night was, of course, Euros Childs. At 24 years of age and with six albums under his belt already, he's a rare talent, a man out of time in this age of boy bands and talent deprivation. Looking uncannily like a miniature Nick Drake, Childs occupied center stage behind his keyboards--occasionally emerging to play guitar. He's a uniquely self assured songwriter who is blessed with a rich and diverse creative vision. Childs's live performance foregrounded an ability to pen songs that run the gamut of style and tone, songs that are always enhanced by the musicality of his voice, which moves effortlessly from lulling, lower ranges right up to a Brian Wilson-esque falsetto.
While he seems shy and jittery in the spaces between songs, hiding behind his hair and repeatedly giving us the thumbs up, Euros is back in his element when the next track starts. Then he gets totally lost in music. But he's not affected or contrived, just completely absorbed by what he's doing, and it's that intensity that makes Gorky's especially engaging live. While much of the time Childs' intensity took the form of quiet focus and application, at times it was translated into sheer physical energy. This was indeed the case during the Roxy Music-styled "Poodle Rockin," from Spanish Dance Troupe, and "Sweet Johnny" from Gorky 5, with its Beefheart-esque shifts in tempo and volume. During the latter, Childs physically assaulted his bank of keyboards like a man possessed, much to the delight of the crowd.
Although Childs was obviously the center of attention, the endeavors of the other Gorky's should not go unrecognized. Particularly noteworthy was Megan Childs's perfectly integrated violin playing which evokes--as others have noted--the sound crafted by Scarlet Rivera on Desire and David Mansfield on Street Legal.
While the tracks from Barafundle, "Meirion Wyllt" and "Patio Song," were particular highlights, the finest moment came at the end of last night's show with the instant classic "The Humming Song" from Spanish Dance Troupe. This fragile piece is quite an achievement. Centered around Childs's simple but emotive piano and his understated, soothing vocals, "The Humming Song" packs a whole range of emotion into four-and-a-half minutes, building up and managing to soar momentarily but ultimately settling back into melancholy.
Gorky's put the largely unfashionable notion of musicianship back on the rock map. And there's nothing wrong with musicianship, especially when it's so unpretentious and so full of substance as the brand that they perform.
There were mutterings at the end of the set owing to the absence of an encore but when you consider the set-up of the venue it makes sense that the Gorky's didn't come back. At the Mercury Lounge bands have to access the stage through the crowd. To do an encore they'd have had to push their way to the back of the room, stand there for a bit and then push their way back up to the front. All a bit pointless and awkward really, especially given Childs's apparent shyness. And besides, after "The Humming Song," there was really no need for anything else.
