That Summer in My Heart
It’s a sun-splashed Saturday where I live today. The kind of Saturday morning that stands out in childhood nostalgia where it’s warm but not too hot, where there’s a vague whiff in the air of freshly mowed lawns, and where the days feel bulging with the possibility of doing utterly fun things that even a kind observer would describe as doing not much at all.
It’s a Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci sort of a Saturday.
What does that entail, you might ask? Well, GZM were a Welsh band that made a good go of it during the 1990s and early Aughts before calling it quits. Stylistically, they just followed their particular muse wherever it may have led them, and it took them all over the map, from stomping 90s indie rock to early stirrings of what the kids today call freak folk to old school prog rock to experimental weirdness. Oh, and a fair amount of their songs were sung in their native Welsh, so yeah. Probably a long shot to find a huge audience, I suppose.
But what connects them to this particular Saturday for me is how many Gorky’s songs feel connected to the earth and nature around all of us, and especially the Summer. An awful lot of GZM songs are about the summer, and sound like the kind of musical soundtrack you’d be listening to lying on your back on the top of a small hill on a meadow, leaning against a shade tree reading a book.
And so, I thought, I’ll make myself a Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci playlist on Spotify. Except no, I can’t. GZM’s recording career was split across five different record labels, only one of which (Beggar’s Group/Mantra) felt like putting their music up on streaming services. (Terrible label support dogged the band throughout their career — Mercury/Polygram even declined to issue one of their best records in North America back in the day, and it’s never gotten a proper stateside release to this day.)
Thus, as you’ve guessed no doubt, I made myself my own Gorky’s playlist from my own record collection. And I put every song in this hour-long playlist into a specific order for summer afternoon listening as a single stitched-together file, with the volume normalized across everything, as usual. And because more people should listen to one of the best, loveliest bands to ever exist, I’m sharing it here.
(If you’re interested in more info on Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci, here’s the quick rundown: they formed while the band members were all in the Welsh equivalent of American high school. The band’s singer and principle songwriter, Euros Childs — and his sister Megan, who plays fiddle and sings in the band — were raised in a home where their parents taught them to speak Welsh first. The band’s name is terrible, and apparently deliberately so. As Childs once told an interviewer, “Gorky’s” was just their teenaged slang for gawky, “Mynci” is a creative misspelling of the Welsh word mwnci for monkey, and Zygotic came from a biology class, with the group name meant to be the worst name they could come up with as a lark. Everyone in the band could sing and play beautifully, lending especially to complex arrangements and harmonies to prop up Childs’ whimsical, occasionally deliberately wobbly voice. Oh, and they wrote some of the most insanely catchy and lovely songs I’ve ever heard, so forewarned on the earworms coming your way here. There’s a person who’ll hear a line like “You used to be the sunshine girl but now you’re crying all the time for some past-gone time…” and be indifferent to it…this mix is definitely not for that soul.)
Anyway: music. Click to stream, right-click to download to add to your favorite music playback thingy.
(Track list)
- Diamond Dew
- Where Does Yer Go Now
- Methu Aros Tan Haf (“Can’t Wait Until Summer”)
- Let’s Get Together
- This Summer’s Been Good From the Start
- Patio Song
- Shore Light
- Happiness
- Fresher Than the Sweetness in Water
- Blue Skies
- Tsunami
- Freckles
- Cân Megan (“Megan’s Song”)
- How I Long
- Face Like Summer
- Her Hair Hangs Long
- Starmoonsun
- Faraway Eyes
- Leave My Dreaming
- Hush The Warmth
Popnarcotic 