at a glance...

Hometown: Cardiff, Wales
Formed: 1993

Members:
Gruff Rhys -guitar, vocals
Cian Ciaran -keyboards, vocals, gum-chewing difficulties
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

An easy trick when reviewing a record is to focus entirely on the influences you hear and then match them up in a nice little phrase. Everyone does it; I've done it. It's actually pretty helpful for the reader, because if you like the two or three bands or songs the reviewer mentions, you'll want to go out and buy the album. But if you don't, you won't, and that's that. So just because something is easy doesn't mean it's helpful.

For example, I could say that the first track, the cute waltzy instrumental "Furryvision...," is a bit like ELO on downers playing at Brit-pop's funeral, but would that help you understand what a perfect opener it is? What's the good of telling you that "She's Got Spies" is the greatest Ramones song the Ramones never sang, backed by XTC in their Beach Boys phase, if you never get the chance to jump around insanely to its brilliant chorus, which is perhaps the greatest chorus in any pop song ever sung by white people? Is it really so important to know that the student's anthem "Hermann Loves Pauline" is the unholy marriage of Blur, Deja Vu-era CSNY, the Kinks, Pearl Jam, Sweet, Benny Hill and the Righteous Brothers, singing one of the songs from a Thomas Pynchon novel? No, because unless you hear it, you won't know what a great uplifting slab of heart it is. (By the way, the closer, "Mountain People," is Led Zeppelin in bed with mid-period Jefferson Starship until it turns into Alec Empire trashing your grandfather's collection of old John Phillip Sousa 78s, but that's probably not too helpful either.)

The Super Furry Animals are certainly influenced by just about every kind of music in the world, but they happily accept and blithely transcend their influences on Radiator. This album is heartfelt, poppy, rockish, techno, retro and futuro and every other genre in the world, all at the same time, with a bizarre sense of humor and a deep sense of purpose. It's got songs like "Download," which confirm SFA as friends of the sensitive working class. Songs like "Chupacabras," which just make you bang your head against the wall with happiness. And if it gets a little too Foreigner or Bob James at times, you'll forgive them, because they're young and have neat voices and actually seem like they give a shit about real people and, most importantly, they write brilliant songs and perform them well. Radiator is the fucking epitome of music.

If you like Super Furry Animals, check out:
Super Furry Animals Fuzzy Logic
Super Furry Animals Mwng
Super Furry Animals Guerrilla
Prince and the Revolution Around the World in a Day
Sweet Desolation Boulevard
Supergrass Supergrass
The Orb Adventures Beyond the Underworld
David Bowie Hunky Dory
Bis Social Dancing

-- Matt Cibula