Over the course of a prolific recording career, Welsh band Gorky's Zygotic Mynci have morphed from psychedelic experimenters into perhaps the most imaginative folk-rock outfit to emerge from the U.K. in post-punk times.

While that status was established by last year's brilliant acoustic mini-album The Blues Trees, new full-length disc How I Long To Feel That Summer In My Heart marries stripped-down guitar and fiddle melodicism with spacious arrangements, dashes of harpsichord, and pedal steel twang. The effects reach rock-operatic proportions on opener Where Does Yer Go Now?, with its gentle piano break and swirling chorus, and the three-part Christina, as singer-guitarist Euros Childs pines ominously for the attention of a "pretty ballerina."

Better still are pastoral love ballads such as Easy Love and Let Those Blue Skies. With a pleasant high tenor reminiscent of Ray Davies, Childs injects a tone of sweetness and simplicity into his most complicated songs. Even one of the album's few "rockers," the sparkling, Velvets-gone-folk number Her Hair Hangs Long, sounds like the buzz of first love distilled into music. Lovely. (More on: Gorky's Zygotic Mynci).

Track Listing 1. Where Does Yer Go Now?
  2. Honeymoon With You
  3. Stood On Gold
  4. Dead-Aid
  5. Can Megan
  6. Christina
  7. Easy Love
  8. Let Those Blue Skies
  9. These Winds Are In My Heart
  10. How I Long
  11. Her Hair Hangs Long
  12. Hodgeston's Hallelujah