at a glance...

Hometown: Cardiff, Wales
Formed: 1993

Members:
Gruff Rhys -guitar, vocals
Cian Ciaran -keyboards, vocals
Huw "Bunf" Bunford -guitar, vocals
Guto Pryce -bass, vocals
Dafydd Iewan -drums, percussion, vocals

Bands in the family :
The High Llamas

Notes:
These nutters started out as a techno and noise band in Cardiff, but their hungry musical ears, huge ambition, and hook sense soon turned them into something else entirely: a trippy omni-pop band with elan, chops, and a sincere love of the power of music. Their two initial EPs were sung in Welsh and caused a huge buzz all over the U.K. In 1996 their debut album, Fuzzy Logic, blew everyone away, and they played a number of furious live shows, arriving for many of them in a huge florescent-pink tank. The Super Furries manage to make their mix of '60s bubblegum-pop, '70s boogie-punk, '80s indie-garage, and '90s electro-dance sound original and brilliant, while sporting deeply left-wing politics and some serious Welsh accents. 1997's Radiator added complexity and depth to their sound and firmly established them as critics' darlings, popular heroes, and the only band in the U.K. that other bands don't dare talk shit about. They released Guerrilla in 1999 and followed up with a long-promised Welsh album, Mwng in 2000.

Links:
Super Furry Photo Gallery
Interview with SFA

Mwng (say "mane"), SFA's Welsh language album, means "mane," as in a lion's fluffy corona, but to me it means "quiet triumph," which is just what this album is. In interviews, vocalist Gruff Rhys claims to have recorded it in the interest of the universal appeal of music, heedless of linguistic barriers. And on that courageous count, Mwng humbly succeeds.

"Nythod Cacwn's" loping chords will have you keening along to the lyrics, though you've no idea what Rhys is saying. If you're a fair mimic, they may come out sounding like: "Pulling beehives on my head all day/Will this ever end?" - which is, incidentally, exactly what they mean. Congratulations! You're a Welsh speaker. Odd, isn't it? Similarly epiphanic moments occur all over the album. Humming along to the unnatural chorus of "Ymaelodi Â'r Ymylon" ("Joining The Periphery") will take you there - a place that's far more harmonious than the oft-touted center.

What SFA have done here is beautifully sublime, and they've done it without ploy or pretension. They're beyond such criticisms at this point anyhow - they've carved out their own universe, and like it or not, we live in it. The Furries aren't "putting on airs" or trying to "stick it to the man" by singing in their native tongue, they're simply being themselves, and that, in all its innocence, is the root of revolution. Where Fuzzy Logic was youthful graffiti, and Radiator and Guerrilla were student pamphlets, Mwng is SFA's constitution - an avowal of the essentials. Sure, the songs are illogically infectious and lovely (peppered with Bacharach-ish trumpets and glimmering keyboards), but what endure are the emotions, which stand like defiantly grounded obelisks.

Mwng finds the band back down on earth, lamenting war and personal conflict, the passage of time, the death of ruralism and, well...watching your friend get stung by a swarm of bees. One of the album's richest songs, "Sarn Helen," is a paean to an era when one Roman road was more efficient than coils of convenient routes and off-ramps. To review this album adequately though, I'd need have the Blakean insight of Rhys, so multitudinous are the elements at play here. But like everything in the SFA cosmology, intricacy is simplicity, and simply put, Mwng is SFA's maudlin and triumphantly human album.

If you like Super Furry Animals, check out:
Super Furry Animals Fuzzy Logic
Super Furry Animals Radiator
Super Furry Animals Guerrilla
Gorky's Zygotic Mynci Spanish Dance Troupe
Gorky's Zygotic Mynci Barafundle
The Beta Band The Three EPs
Robyn Hitchcock Invisible Hitchcock
Mercury Rev See You On The Other Side
The Beatles Abbey Road
Supergrass Supergrass
Nick Drake Five Leaves Left
Robert Wyatt Rock Bottom
Pink Floyd Saucerful Of Secrets

-- p