How I Long To Feel That Summer In My Heart

Long underestimated, perceived as the kooky, flaked-out, Magic Roundabout-watching, Renaissance-festival-attending younger sibling of Super Furry Animals, this deceptively gentle collection of eccentric, accomplished folk-pop – their eighth – offers further evidence that it’s the quiet ones you have to watch.

The Myncis survived major-label messing a few years ago to bring us the delightfully deranged Catalan-o-phile deserter’s song that was ‘Spanish Dance Troupe.’ And indeed How I Long… continues daisy-chaining their spacey Beach Boys psychedelia with a kind of folk-orchestral ruralism pioneered by John Cale. Thus, as usual, the pop songs here – ‘Her Hair Hangs Long,’ or ‘Honeymoon With You’ – are lovely woozy things, all plasticine Brian Wilson chord changes and mild cacophonies and Euros Childs’ odd, squelchy glottals.

But if anything, as befits a band whose last album The Blue Trees was a collection of medieval folk songs, they’re equally beguiling when they’re partying like it’s 1599: witness the sunny flower-strewn pastorale of ‘Easy Love,’ or the inky-black sea-shanty of ‘These Winds Are In My Heart,’ all sweaty-handed love-oaths and turgid black sea.

And occasionally, the modern and the classic meet, with dire consequences, as on ‘Christina:’ Euros “first saw her”, to our infinite joy and amusement, “in a magazine-ah”, and, well, “What’s the point of living if we can’t be together/I’m coming now to shoot you, the sooner the better”. Dedicated to goth child-woman Christina Ricci, perhaps? We hope so: once the restraining order was in place, she’d love them.