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EUROS CHILDS: The Miracle Inn [Wichita]

With the muffled reveries of Something Else-era Kinks and the reduced heart rate of the Velvet Underground’s third album acting as rough guidelines, Euros Childs has produced a solo work every bit as endearing and important as the early stuff by his former band, Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci. Even the relatively up-tempo “Ali Day,” with its subtle poaching from the Kinks’ “Victoria,” seems impossibly sad here. The Wales-based Childs, whose voice wavers between an over-caffeinated Ray Davies and a falsetto that could crack a bell jar, recorded The Miracle Inn mainly with piano and acoustic guitar and jettisoned the prog-rock embellishments that stood between Gorky’s and the popular acclaim the band richly deserved. Anyone who complained about Gorky’s recording some material in its native tongue should note that Childs’ English here is only barely more decipherable than his Welsh. It doesn’t really matter. By the end of the sprawling, 15-minute title track, you’ll feel like you’ve just downed a couple of pints at a pub in Aberystwyth—halfway between Swansea and Caernarvon—and stepped out into a brisk August evening to get a good lungful of coal smoke, with no Burger King within a hundred miles. [www.wichita-recordings.com]

—Jud Cost