Euros Childs - Son Of Euro Child

(Muso's Guide, September 18, 2009)

Album review

The new solo album from warbling Welsh oddball Euros Childs is probably already in your record collection - it’s been on sale at recent E.C. gigs for a measly £10 and it’s even available free of charge from the official Euros website.

For the unencumbered and, well, the uninitiated, a small digest of its contents may help.

Best known as the voice - and, let’s face it, heart - of 1990s indie wunderkinds Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci, Euros is a multi-instru-mentalist with a nice line in Welsh language tunage.

Son Of Euro Child makes this young chap’s fifth solo record, and is easily the most accessible to date. It’s easy when you hit your 30-something stride, it seems. But for all his newfound maturity, from the opening jolly ‘Shithausen’, it’s clear that E.C. is in his best childlike form, all giddy rhythms and entrancing organ wrapped around deliciously sweet vocals.

There are moments of darkness, such as ‘The Dog’ - all reverberating organ and wistful words - but the mood is predominantly one of musical lightness, through the wonky piano parade of ‘The Fairy Feller’s Masterstroke’ to the blistering pop insta-classic of ‘1000 Pictures Of You’ and beyond.

‘Mother Kitchen’ is none more Gorky’s, with its staccato melody and quirky lyrics: “So buy yourself some dinner/Have a chicken soup/Stick it in the oven/See what it will do/Your mother’s in the kitchen…” It’s like it’s 1996 all over again - and it tastes good.

There is a very real sense of the magical about Euros - he takes the meandering musical mystery tour and places it at the heart of all of his work, revelling in tangential sounds and intangible feelings and making everything seem terribly abstract and free.

But this is a trained musician with a lot of experience making music that people love to listen to, so to dismiss him as a nonsensical Celtic pixie is to do him a tremendous disservice.

The second best thing about Son Of Euro Child is that it’s free to download right now. The first best thing is listening to it.