EUGENE MC GUINNESS - Eugene Mc Guinness

Mad Hatter of the Kensington Gardens. Stateless minstrel. An Oliver Twist stuffing himself with chloral and dreaming of flying off to "Neverland". Eugene is the heir and the knowing interpreter of that everyday dream-logic, that bourgeois surrealism so typical of Anglo-Saxon culture: dazed normality, madness with its feet on the ground, a rainbow-coloured lining peeking out of a London fog.

And while on "The Early Learnings Of…" he timidly peered out at the outside world, peeking through the holes of a blanket pulled up over his head, both terrified and seduced by the menacing "monsters" lurking "under his bed", now, having "found the switch", the child prodigy dispels the gloom of his bedroom, delighting in toys of the good old kind, the ones made the old-fashioned way, carved by the finest craftsmen of British melody.

He shimmies to a skiffle beat on "Rings Around Rosa", cavorts through the candy-coated post-punk of "Fonz", which sounds like Maximo Park frozen in a Richard Lester frame, choreographs a Kinks-like music hall turn on "Moscow State Circus", scrawls out the twee-pop of "Not So Academic" and "Night Shift", spins the baroque pop-rock of "Atlas" and the more muscular "Disneyland" into circus minuets, and lets loose on numbers like "Those Old Black And White Movies Were True" and "Wendy Wonders", retro japes evoking the 1930s and 1950s respectively.

With an omnivorous, acrobatic, chameleon-like talent, he reinvents this vivid, variegated harmonic texture in a playful, fairy-tale, dazed key.

The quintessence of an unbridled, free-roaming imagination that hurls shards of tradition into a psychedelic, unsettling universe. A 36-minute pop breath-hold that never once lets the listener's attention drift, never allows this polished game of children to be taken lightly, never indulges the suspicion that it's merely a stylistic exercise.

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24/10/2008