6 September 2008 :: there's no hiding from the nuclear apocalypse, but at least we'll all get to hang out

:: Record Review

Super Furry Animals

Fuzzy Logic/Radiator/Outspaced/Guerilla/Mwng Reissue
(Creation/Creation/Creation/Creation/Placid Casual//Beggars/XL; 1996/1997/1998/1999/2000//2005)

Rating: 85/89/79/95/86%
Combined Rating: 81/88/77/90/86%

Over the last year and a half writing for CMG, the thing that has most continually surprised me is the differences that routinely occur in how the writers for this site, an almost painfully homogenous bunch of guys, hear music differently. Where I heard a dull rehashing from Mission of Burma with ON/off/ON, Amir Nezar heard a challenging piece of post-punk. In turn, he found Sleater-Kinney’s recent The Woods as gratuitous, whereas David Goldstein (and most of the staff) found it more than compelling. No one seems to agree on the Fiery Furnaces, and I don’t really like The Arcade Fire (yes, I do have a soul and you should still keep reading).

Divergent opinions are not in and of themselves surprising, really—no one expects some sort of universal reaction to any given album—but what has emerged is that at least some of our disagreements are a result of how we go about judging and reviewing albums. How do we take hype into account? How much of our reactions are based on bands being “derivative” or “stale?” What do these terms even stand for anymore, and do they even matter? Lastly, what do we do about subjectivity? This may take awhile, but face it, it’s better than getting work done, and at the heart of this lies the Super Furry Animals and some of the best music of the last decade.

Foremost is the idea of derivative music. It’s an epithet we see hurled quite regularly and persuasively in music criticism. Put simply, it’s a cop out, it’s an oversimplification, and it sells musicians short, even the ones we may not like. Music has follows an evolutionary process and that ought to be acknowledged. Radiohead follow in the footsteps of Pink Floyd, a case could be made for Pavement being an oddball mixture of The Fall, R.E.M., and Television, and I’ll be damned if the music of The Olivia Tremor Control doesn't bear a suspicious resemblance to that of the Beach Boys. Those are three of my favorite artists; imagine what I could level at, say, Jet, Louis XIV, or the Darkness if I was in the mood.

So what are we left judging? I certainly don’t speak for anyone else at CMG, but the ability to craft original songs and albums has always struck me as the most important. It sounds broad, I know, but think about the really great artists of the last 15 years: Radiohead, Pavement, Spoon, Public Enemy, The Flaming Lips, Wilco, and too many others that I am forgetting, overlooking for the sake of brevity (kind of). These are bands that manage to create their own unmistakable sound, that have a knack for writing great lyrics, that build on the musical history that precedes them, that are consistent, and that know how to construct albums (an art that should never be overlooked). We can assess the quality of songs individually, and perhaps enjoy a particular sequencing, but it’s a lot of hoops to jump through to get to Great Album/Artist status.

Which, conveniently enough, is where Super Furry Animals, a band that by all rights belongs on that list of Great Bands, come into the picture. Beggars/XL has seen fit to re-release their first five albums: their first four proper albums and rarities compilation Out Spaced. These releases, combined with SFA’s post-2000 discography, make a rather convincing case that the Super Furries are far and away the best pop band in the world, and certainly match all my criteria of Great Music.

What other (recent, non-Beach Boys/Beatles-ish) band has ever released six albums of such impressive quality in such a short period of time? What other band has been so consistently creative, so easily avoiding the detractors wielding “Beach Boys rip-off” slander? Hell, what other band can boast having owned their own blue tank or releasing the top-selling Welsh language album of all time (that’d be Mwng)? And sadly, what other band can have so little to show for it? It’s impossible to enter a record store without being bombarded with the posters for X&Y, but try finding any SFA album, much less these reissues; only one of the seven record stores I tried was carrying them.

I’m guessing this doesn’t bother the five crazed Welshmen that make up SFA. Even with their debut, the band seemed concerned with little besides making the music they wanted to make. On Fuzzy Logic's first song, “God! Show me Magic,” the band start their career practically mid-song with blaring guitars that mask the piano vamp that’s the true heart of the song. “Fuzzy Birds” is only one of SFA’s great songs about hamsters, “Something For the Weekend” is the best song ever about wine tasting that’s actually about drugs that’s really about love, and “Hometown Unicorn” is a great alien-abduction saga. I would pay good money to hear a Calexico cover of “Gathering Moss,” to understand how “Mario Man” can possibly be so catchy, and what TV weather girl Sian Lloyd thinks being name-dropped in anthemic album closer “For Now And Ever.”

Still, it was really Radiator that set them apart. Propelled by stellar singles, Radiator made it clear just how innovative, weird and endlessly enjoyable SFA could be. Personal favorites “Demons,” “Herman Loves Pauline” (yes, it's song about Albert Einstein’s parents), and balls-out soccer hooligan rocker “Chupacabras” lead into a fantastic closing quartet. “Bass Tuned to D.E.A.D.” and “Down a Different River” are the sort or perfect love-sick ballad-anthems that the brit-poppers were supposed to have a monopoly on, while the gorgeous “Mountain People” makes it perfectly clear that even a drugged out bunch of Welsh psych-pop rockers can write a great love song.

Then there was Guerrilla. It’s hard not to describe Guerrilla without using a lot of embarrassingly starry-eyed or overzealous adjectives. What I will say is that it is one of the most criminally overlooked albums of the ‘90s. There is not a weak track on the album—everything from hidden opener “The Citizen’s Band” to the brief reprise of “Chewing Chewing Gum” is as great as the band's ever sounded.

It is a perfectly flowing album—not too homogenous, not too rocky—made up of many of their best songs. “Do or Die” is like some great lost Stooges song, “The Turning Tide” should make Radiohead jealous, “Northern Lites” is the happiest song I’ve ever heard about global destruction, and “Night Vision” is one of the best songs SFA didn’t release as a single. The real draw here is the second half, with the album revolving around “Some Things Come From Nothing,” a cut that puts much of the Beta Band’s The Three EPs to shame in its absolute perfect melancholy. It's one of the most sad/beautiful pieces I've heard, and that they manage to match that power with the flawless pop of “Chewing” and “Keep the Cosmic Trigger Happy” again, if you had perhaps forgotten, prove their versatility. And it all sounds completely effortless.

Creation records went belly-up shortly after Guerrilla, and SFA decided to record and release the follow-up themselves. They made Mwng, an album just as enjoyable as any of their others, just significantly less comprehensible. The first half of the disc has never much grabbed me (Ed: "Drygioni" and Ymaelodi'r Ymylon" are probably my favorite SFA opening one-two, for what it's worth), but starting with “Nythod Cacwn” the album is pretty much bulletproof. It’s a far more subdued affair than the band’s other projects, but it seems to suit the ancient language of the songs well. Again, SFA nail the closing with the dark “Sarn Helen” leading up to the gorgeous, epic “Gwreiddiau DWFN/Mawrth Oer Ar y Blaned Neifion.”

The one reissue I was dubious about was 1998’s Outspaced comp. I had this year’s stellar Songbook; how many comps are necessary? Even with great sequencing (like Songbook it’s arranged in album format), and a handful of classic songs (stoner anthem “Smokin’” most notably) it hardly feels like a necessity. Still, there’s a charming mental instability to the Ramones-channeling punk of “Guacamole” and “Don’t Be a Fool, Billy” that shouldn't be missed. “Pass the Time” and “Carry the Can” are as good as anything on Radiator, and “Blerwytirhwng?” is a huge fan favorite for good reason.

As for the bonus tracks that come with the reissues, there’s plenty here to justify the extra discs. “Lazy Life,” “Death by Melody,” and “Waiting to Happen” from the Fuzzy Logic bonus disc are all pop gems, while the reimagining of “International Language of Screaming” for “No K” is hilarious. The Guerrilla offerings suffer in comparison to the album material, but the Mwng tracks, already widely available in the U.S., match anything on that record, especially the beautiful “Cryndod Yn Dy Lais” and rocker “Trons Mr Urdd.”

So there you have it: the first five releases from Super Furry Animals, with an average rating of 87%, making them pretty much the most favorably reviewed band in the history of CMG. I hope Songbook has sparked enough interest to spur sales of these great albums; I expect that “Laser Beam,” the lead single off the forthcoming 7th LP, Love Kraft, will match up to their previous material; and I imagine that it still won’t nearly be enough to catapult SFA to the level of recognition they deserve. It’s a shame; even though they have Great Band written all over them, the Super Furries are great for the same reasons they'll never be a hugely popular or extravagently rich rock band. There's nothing straight-forward or predictable at all about them, nothing to assure us that the very next song we hear won't be a disaster.

But it rarely is. Fuzzy Logic, Outspaced and Mwng have their rough spots, but every last one of these reissues, like Songbook, re-introduce the work of a remarkably creative, nonsensical, beautiful, ridiculous and outrageously fun "rock" band that still makes great music. It's true that none of these resissues are perfect (Guerrilla and Radiator come closest); but each is strong, and certainly worth buying. Peter Hepburn :: 15 June 2005 |                

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