Hometown: Carmarthen, Wales
Formed: mid 80s

Members:
Euros Childs -vocals, all manner of keyboards/organs/pianos
Megan Childs -violin, vocals
John Lawrence -many kinds of guitars, backing vocals
Euros Rowlands -percussion
Richard James -bass
Gorwel Owen -keyboards/organs/pianos

Notes:
That rare beast -- a Welsh bilingual psychedelic folk/pop group of indeterminate membership -- Gorky's released Patio, and Tatay on Welsh indie label Ankst prior to 1995's Bywyd Time, which started to draw a lot of attention to them and the Welsh music scene. Mercury Records snapped them up and released the Introducing... comp in the U.S. in the same year, followed by Barafundle in 1997. Fontana released the album in Britain, where it was an indie No. 1. Despite a strong cult following and consistently excellent reviews, Gorky's were dropped by their label in Britain after Gorky 5. Guitarist John Lawrence soon departed to pursue other projects, but the band rebounded with Spanish Dance Troupe, even securing some airplay for the album's title track on Britain's Radio 1.

If you've heard anything about Gorky's, it's likely about how weird they are. How many of their songs are in Welsh, and the English ones are about wizards and gnomes and stuff. How they've eaten every "special" mushroom in Wales, and ended up one of the most inscrutable, iconoclastic pop bands of the '90s.

All this is true. But have you heard the tunes? Barafundle has tunes on top of its tunes. It frequently eases into the most stunning melody, only to scrap it after a few bars and pick up on another. Euros Childs has a fine voice (as do Megan and John, his primary backing vocalists) but they're often pushed to their limits by the vast melodic and harmonic ranges these songs explore. You get the feeling that the complexity of the arrangements is also being dictated by the ambition of the tunes -- as if they needed Spanish guitar, violin, jew's harp and 12 kinds of organ just to reach all the notes.

"Patio Song" and "Heywood Lane" are impossibly catchy and wonderfully crafted for staying power. "The Barafundle Bumbler" and "Sometimes the Father Is the Son" are spectacularly evocative hymns to childhood. "Diamond Dew" is the perfect overture to a psych-pop symphony, and if it doesn't drive Brian Wilson and Paul McCartney into a desperate collaboration, then someone's not paying attention.