Tuesday, November 24, 2009

Noughties By Nature #93: Euros Childs - First Time I Saw You

It starts with a curious, squelchy, electronic noise (my spell check has recognised 'squelchy' as a word, so that must be what it is): I am utterly unable to suggest what sort of instrument may have made it, but it sounds like some electronic toy from the past gone wrong or part of a tune from an 8-bit computer game played through a broken television. In comes young Euros (well, not so young these days, sightly older than me if Wikipedia's to be believed, but I have difficulty imagining him being any older than he was when Gorky's first started doing sessions on Mark Radcliffe's Graveyard Shift; it's probably because his hair doesn't appear to have changed since then) telling us about the effect of the first time he saw some girl he's really keen on. And that's about it. For eight minutes.

Well, all right, it builds up a bit, there's some gentle banjo and pleasing keyboard noises and it builds to a fairly polite climax, but that certainly doesn't explain why this would be worth eight minutes of anyone's time. Maybe it's because the simple details of his beloved that the narrator picks out combined with the curious yet lovely backing evokes something of the giddiness of the early throes of love ("How could anybody be above you?" asks Euros at one point, which always invokes a wistful thought or two around here). Or possibly it's the endlessly repeating eight-note squelchy noise.

It's the squelchy noise. I'm sitting here trying to make a similar noise with my mouth and failing miserably. I realise that this is an incredibly flimsy reason to really like a song. I'm sorry.
Matt Sullivan

[Spotify]
[Album: Chops]

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