20 July 2008 :: oh good, mom's birthday is coming up, so

:: Record Review

Super Furry Animals

Phantom Phorce/Slow Life EP
(Sony; 2004)

Rating: 59%

Phantom Phorce, now available in nostalgic but infuriating cardboard packaging, is composed of remixes culled from last year’s Phantom Power DVD. With the forgettable Slow Life EP tagging along, these hit-or-horribly-miss remixes bowl through the entirety of last year’s Phantom Power, sans charming and dull animation shorts. Tongue-in-cheek producer Kurt Stein also filters each remix through interesting memories of the altered reality of the Phantom Power recording process. The conglomerate is ultimately cute, an expected result and juicy representation of the Super Furry pretty-guts pop amalgam, but the music doesn’t hold up, and with a few exceptions, “cute” is the extent of Phantom Phorce’s draw.

2001’s Rings Around the World solidified the emergence of the rather new accessibility to magnificent recording techniques at the time, riling up the psych-pop tendencies that fumed in the recesses of the new decade. While most of these expensive machines and fat, precise microphones seemed to be relegated to “sheening” the scrap and rattle out of every extraneous hiss as far as new releases were concerned, SFA filled Rings to the brim. Phantom Power offered much of the same, maintaining the flawless harmonies and gigantic melodies of its predecessors (Guerilla(1999) stomped all over the end of that decade) while focusing Gruff Rhys’s songwriting into the most satisfying, bafflingly simple songs of SFA’s short and meaty career. Did I also sense a hint of restraint? From the Furries? Yeah, sure, but by the time of Phantom’s post-release afterglow, I had shelved all doubts about the scope of the band’s promise and was willing to trust them like a Welsh citizen trusts the red dragon.

So, Phantom Phorce, as new release and as reissued companion piece, is a disappointment. The fact that it is a remix album does not hold up against scrutiny: the chips and bits of Power’s songs seem tailor-made for alternate takes, and, given the chance, these new artists come up short. As Kurt Stein so obliquely shares, “Bunf had the grand idea, according to him at least, that he wanted to scrap all his background vocals of this song and replace them with the sound of gunshot blasts…” Minotaur Shock’s version of “Cityscape Skybaby” retrieves those background vocals from the thresher, releasing them into the foreground, and watches them totter and weave about on their own accord. DJ pun: in other words, Phantom Phorce’s artists had their work cut out for them.

Some win out. Killa Kela’s “Golden Retriever” saddles Gruff’s whip-lashed vocals on top of a hyper beat box, and he ends up sounding more a tired cattle wrangler than hipster crooner. Kela succeeds in stripping the original song down to its necessities, leaving the obligatory chorus and angry bebop riff, complimenting and reinterpreting the track like an anxious student. Both are enjoyable listens, maintaining the most curious parts of the original recordings while hammering out something tastily non-Furry.

As is Four Tet’s “Piccolo Snare.” Segueing into a surprising facsimile of Power’s midnight revelry, Four Tet swims through acid jazz percussion before tripping into a bloated chorus with every IDM lover’s double-deuce SWELL. Zan Lyons does “Out of Control” mighty well, turning the original’s industrial bruising into a waltz through Kubrick’s sweetest hell. Sir Doufous Style’s “Slow Life” builds a throttling synth beat from a snowy harmony, making the most out of five pistoling minutes.

The rest of “Phorce” loses focus all too quickly. “Hello Sunshine” tags the beginning and end, first administering heavy sedatives to slow the elementary school birthday-party-heart of Phantom Power’s opening track, and then skewing it so thoroughly as to leave nothing but annoying gargle. Otherwise, Boom Bip settles ever so solemnly into boredom and Massimo drains “Venus & Serena” of every last rivulet of life. Although “Sex, War & Robots” beams with a peculiar kind of Flashdance charm, it stands as greasily distant from the original cut as Massimo’s long trough of slop sits from “Serena.”

Stein’s vocal tracks need mention. His stories are delightfully deadpan, especially when he describes a sound engineer dying and a wombat getting booted to death. Mostly, as is the case with the cardboard video game console the album’s packaging painfully morphs into, Stein’s words reek of novelty. So damn cute. Did he just say “natch” at the end of a sentence?

Phantom Phorce, while expected to take its subject in new and unreal directions, just feels cold next to Phantom Power. Power’s palette, as well as the Super Furry Animal’s catalog, is ripe for the picking, puckered with whistles, heavy-powered rifles, and layers of ingenious vocal parts. The remixes, instead, grin with bedridden melancholia, stale and covered in interesting sores. It’s true that while a love for Phantom Power’s red-cheeked antics could heartily ruin Phorce’s effect, on the flip side, such love could be the phorce keeping these tracks alive.

But wait! There’s a bonus. “Slow Life” slides perfectly into the Phantom Power lineup, but in the Slow Life EP, it proves to be an essential crutch for two inferior tracks. While the title track still pedals through an exciting vista of surf harmonies and cut-and-paste electronics, “Motherfokker” amounts to a Pez candy up the nose; it floods the speakers with disco beats and vulgarity, but its shoddy guest rapping scours away the happy glow of “Life.” “Lost Control” barely makes it past being another “Out of Control” remix, living up to its altered title within its last minute.

Something always salivating about the Super Furry Animals is the way they wear their exuberance on their sleeves. Just as the name suggests, they seem to exist all over this godforsaken world, a collective of prolific hyper-creatures. Phantom Phorce feels familiar coming from the band. Maybe a natural step. But the remix artists seem too mired in plotting every extraneous noise to come close to, let alone champion, the effortless pace and complexity of the Furries. But by the time Slow Life closes, the alliteration in “Phorce” just feels a tad too predictable. Dom Sinacola :: 20 October 2004 |                

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