Super Furry Animals

Well before Animal Collective captivated the blogosphere with their pop subversion, another group of costume-wearing animals won over critics by running their pop hooks through a filter of artful wackiness. Super Furry Animals never pushed the mainstream away, though; after all, they even (mostly) stopped singing songs in Welsh after their early years. Their eighth album amplifies their accessibility further, focusing largely on good-natured pop with bubbly hooks and psychedelic embellishments in all the right places.

After kicking off with the nutty "Gateway Song," frontman Gruff Rhys bites into "Run-Away," nailing the soaring chorus while the band raises a Spector-like ruckus. Nods to The Beach Boys continue in the effervescent harmonies on "Show Your Hand" and "The Gift That Keeps Giving." While these pretty, perfectly executed pop songs don't push the band's boundaries, it's hard to imagine a better opening sequence. Throughout, Rhys sounds like a songwriter still at the peak of his game—surely a relief to SFA fans, some of whom thought that Rhys would sacrifice the band in favor of his burgeoning solo career (he has two albums released thus far).

Typically, there's still something for everyone. Fans of SFA's stranger material will likely flock to "Baby Ate My Eightball" and "Battersea Odyssey"—the latter featuring a weird, watery vocal from guitarist Huw Bunford. Beneath the oddities, though, even these songs remain grounded with memorable pop melodies.

When they kick up the guitar fuzz, SFA resemble some of their more famous British brethren from the mid-'90s (Pulp, Blur, etc.). Perhaps because of the familiarity of that sound and how it's been pillaged by sub-par bands over the years, "Neo Consumer" skips along energetically but somewhat innocuously. "Into the Night" suffers from a similar problem, but does feature more diverse instrumentation and the album's most overt psychedelic jam, using Middle Eastern influences to pleasant effect.

—Adam McKibbin
01.23.08

Sometime after Radiator, Super Furry Animals began exploring a wide sonic world, eventually drifting far out into orbit with albums like Rings Around the World and Phantom Power, albums so ambitious and so packed with celeb cameos that they brought the band attention from the respectable press. As accomplished as those albums were, they found SFA losing their divine gift of suggesting that anything could happen, the very thing that made their first four albums so divine. While they didn't get as overstuffed and lethargic as Mercury Rev or Flaming Lips did when they turned all serious -- an impish sense of humor always pulsated underneath their music -- Super Furry Animals did turn a bit ponderous, which made the relative levity of Love Kraft welcome even if the album was uneven, but that warm, hazy record in no way suggested the full-fledged return to pop power that is 2007's Hey Venus! By far the tightest record SFA has released since Radiator -- boasting no song over five minutes and four clocking in under three -- this is a concise, song-oriented record, which is somewhat ironic since it began its life as something as a concept album. The narrative was ditched during the recording as the group culled together 11 songs that hold together as an intensely colorful, insanely catchy pop album. Such a claim may suggest that this is the return of the frenzied rush of Fuzzy Logic, which isn't exactly true, because after a flurry of hooks at the outset -- "Run-Away," "Show Your Hand," and even the cleverly tossed-off opener, "The Gateway Song," all hold their own with "God! Show Me Magic" and "Herman Loves Pauline" -- the record settles into softer territory, trading on the lush Beach Boys, Bacharach, and ELO of their turn-of-the-century records. But if those albums were gauzy, as much about the texture as about the tune, here the focus is solely on the song, with each of the 11 tracks standing on its own yet working together to create an addictive 37-minute pop album. And just because this is disciplined in a way that Super Furry Animals haven't been in years doesn't mean they've ceased to progress -- they've never had songs as lazily soulful as the closing "Let the Wolves Howl at the Moon" or "The Gift That Keeps Giving" with its electric sitars, and "Baby Ate My Eightball" threads their electronic fascinations into a lean rocker, the kinds of subtle innovations that prove that the Furries can still surprise as they enter their second decade. That reclaimed sense of unpredictability is as easy to embrace as the simple pop pleasures of Hey Venus! as a whole. [Rough Trade US' 2008 edition included a bonus CD.] ~ Stephen Thomas Erlewine, All Music Guide