Super Furry Animals - The Welsh heresy of super-fuzzy pop

Fuzzy Logic is therefore an undeniably good record, and it's important too because it contains the seed of what Super Furry Animals would manage to become only from the following year onward: one of the most convincing examples of what it means to have audacity and personality within pop.

It took just one year for Radiator to be released, the first, and perhaps the brightest, example of the band acquiring a strong, well-defined personality, easily distinguishable from everything else happening musically at that moment.

Granted, it can't be said that Super Furry Animals were the only ones venturing into sonic research based on contaminations between the guitar-bass-drums triangle and synthetic instrumentation: just consider that the same period that gave us Radiator also saw the release of “Ok Computer” by Radiohead, “Vanishing Point” by Primal Scream, and even “The Fat Of The Land” by Prodigy, but it's clear that these three celebrated titles have nothing to do with Radiator beyond what's just been said. Each in its own way, they're defined by a rich, shifting sonic fabric that blends electric and electronic elements in order to deliver extreme sensations to the listener—be it anger, depression or alienation, there's always a troubled emotional state embodying the ideas underlying each track, and the albums as concepts too. The strength of Radiator lies in how far it pushes experimentation while always keeping it within the bounds of a pure pop context, never sacrificing melody, lightness or disenchantment—elements one would much more easily picture within a simpler, more homogeneous sonic construction, rather than the intricate edifice that defines this record.

What's striking, too, is that it's not pop placing itself at the service of experimentation, but exactly the opposite: Radiator proves beyond doubt that it's possible to create loops and layers—rhythmically, sonically and in terms of songwriting—while keeping an uncontaminated pop nature intact.

The breadth of the album's range, from whichever of the angles just mentioned you want to view it, is striking and frankly hard to describe. A track like “The Placid Casual”, placed right after the brief instrumental intro, already gives a sense of the level of imagination running constantly through the work: it's a song with an extremely liquid sound, like a current flowing alongside others that join in and then drift away; Rhys's vocal delivery fits this particular shape perfectly, making a decisive contribution to the track's overall effect. Right after comes “The International Language Of Screaming”, more angular and square-cut, with a steadier, almost martial pace, where the importance of vocal interplay and choral textures that defined “God! Show Me Magic” returns. These two very different tracks are followed by yet another type altogether: “Demons” is a full-blown ballad, whose compositional approach sticks close to the classic song form and whose sound is built on a constant ebb and flow of intensity and a wide, ever-shifting range of arrangements.

Reading about three such different songs placed one after another might suggest a disjointed work, but instead all the tracks are tied together by an enviable stylistic coherence. Sure, variety is a dominant element throughout the record: in some tracks electric instrumentation prevails, while in others—more numerous—electronics play a bigger role; the differences in songwriting are even more pronounced, with each song's melodic structure and development always bringing something of its own compared to every other track, without the album ever losing its logical thread or overall stylistic coherence. The best part is that every single element, voice included, has a role to play, both in creating the various sonic harmonies and in giving shape to the melodic ideas: in short, nothing is superfluous and everything serves multiple purposes.

It's also important not to forget the elements that were already starting to define the band's personality, as mentioned regarding their debut: they all return here too, and everything said about Radiator adds to the strengths of Fuzzy Logic rather than replacing them.

Radiator therefore represents not just a significant leap in quality compared to an already fine debut, but has the merit of placing Super Furry Animals squarely among the bands with a musical language all their own—a commodity that, by the late Nineties, was becoming increasingly rare.

While waiting for the third album, Guerrilla, Out Spaced was released in November 1998, a collection of recordings from EPs already out between 1995 and 1996. By far the best-known track is “The Man Don't Give A Fuck”, which can be seen as an extremely catchy preview of what the band would show on Radiator and the albums that followed. The song remains, to this day, one of the most beloved by both fans and the band itself, who invariably use it to close their shows, and it boasts considerable appeal and strong overall quality. The rest of the tracks feel like a genuine testing ground, on which the band sketches out and develops ideas: listening to these songs is nonetheless far from pointless, partly because the quality never drops below at least enjoyable, and partly because the songs themselves stand as an interesting document of how, even early in their career, the seeds of all the elements that would allow Super Furry Animals to define their own pop language were already sprouting.

And here it is, Guerrilla, the second of the three masterpieces signed by the Welsh band. It's 1999, a time when it seemed almost mandatory, if you wanted to attract any attention at all, to offer something that echoed “Ok Computer”. Nothing could be further from the intentions of Gruff Rhys and co., who press on undeterred with their sonic—and I'd say philological—research. Indeed, what defines this record is precisely the analysis of musical languages other than pop in the strict sense, yet adjacent to it, filtered through the personal vision the band has by now acquired.

In fact, the album opens with a fairly conventional track, the single “Do Or Die”: dirty but sun-drenched sound, close to the traditional song form, and great vocal dynamism. After that, it's a genuine carousel of different influences: “Northern Lites” has one of the most open melodies in the band's entire catalogue, and the sound is particularly clean too, but what sets it apart from an ordinary indie-pop song is the heavy presence of horns and percussion steeped in Caribbean exoticism; “Wherever I Lay My Phone (That's My Home)”, on the other hand, is hard to pin down within any kind of framework, with its hip-hop pulses mixed with drum'n'bass avant-gardism, and a rhythm and development so schizophrenic it makes your head spin; “The Door To This House Remains Open”, finally, winks at jungle but paradoxically ends up more regular and easier to follow, a sign of how the band never let itself be swept away by the conventions of the various musical languages it chose to draw on.

Everything coexists with remarkable harmony across these 14 tracks, and this balance, hard to imagine in the abstract, is achieved precisely because, once again, the band doesn't put its own nature at the service of this urge to broaden its horizons, but rather keeps its own identity front and centre at all times, so that the growing range of influences represents a genuine enrichment, not a haphazard pile-up of new elements. Nothing of what the band had offered so far is missing, either stylistically or in terms of quality, and the significant new elements listed above manage the difficult feat of not being mere additions, but true interminglings within a pastiche that keeps enriching itself while also becoming ever better balanced.

The band's creative ferment was such that, while making Guerrilla, they recorded a further batch of songs in a completely different style: tracks with a distinctly lo-fi approach, both in sound and composition, and above all sung in Welsh, a choice that would make Super Furry Animals genuine heroes in their homeland. The band decided these songs should be gathered into a proper album, and pitched the idea to Creation. Alan McGee's label, however, turned it down, straining the relationship with the band, who nonetheless didn't lose heart and, determined to release the record regardless, founded their own label, naming it “Placid Casual” (the title of one of the songs from Radiator).

Mwng (meaning “mane”) came out in 2000 and would become the best-selling Welsh-language album in history, coming close to cracking the Top 10 in Britain. Though obviously less compelling than the band's other work from the period, it's a well-crafted record for several reasons. First of all, the sound strikes a good balance between guitars and synthetic elements and, despite its rawness, never comes across as cacophonous; the melodies, perfectly in keeping with the sonic character, are elusive and loosely defined, yet always well-aimed, so that the songs as a whole remain sharply in focus; these two elements, along with the purely rhythmic side, help bring about a certain stylistic variety; finally, the sound of the Welsh language suits Gruff Rhys's vocal timbre and the record's overall style extremely well. The fact that Mwng was essentially made in the band's spare time shows just how inspired a state Super Furry Animals were in during that period.

2001 brought the band, first, a major label change (from Creation to Sony, with a guarantee that the major wouldn't interfere with the release of the album in the works), and then the arrival of the new masterpiece Rings Around The World. The album would mark the last occasion on which Super Furry Animals managed to express something truly innovative, while the records that followed would only offer reworkings of what had already been expressed during their golden period.

Having defined their own personal vision of pop with Radiator and explored the possibilities of interaction with other musical languages through Guerrilla, the band decided to condense the results achieved into songs structured in a more conventional form—both in compositional terms, closer than ever to the traditional song form, and in rhythm, almost always slow and controlled even in the few faster moments, far removed from the frenzy of the two albums just mentioned, and finally in sound, full and rounded and decidedly more homogeneous. The most effective example here is “Juxtapozed With U”, probably the band's single most famous song: the sound and melody are soft, almost a comfort to whoever comes across it, but that doesn't make them conventional—managing to remain stimulating even for the most attentive and demanding listener.

Among the handful of livelier tracks, it's worth mentioning the near-title-track "(Drawing) Rings Around The World", which keeps a structured form without venturing into full-blown experimentation, but still packs in a good variety of ideas, both compositionally and in terms of arrangement.

Overall, the small miracle Super Furry Animals pull off across these 13 songs is building a compact, accessible work without giving up the stylistic signature forged on their past records: once again, their personal musical language proves able to adapt to the chosen form without losing its identity. Naturally, all this means that the purely experimental side of the band, which had reached its peak visibility on Guerrilla, is less developed here, but it's expressed just enough to ensure the songs remain highly distinctive, with a sound that's never boxed into preset schemes but left free to roam across the range of solutions that has by now become the band's trademark.

Rings Around The World shows how a solidly built personal style can make songs that are structured in a fairly conventional way still feel varied and artistically relevant.

The state of grace was bound to fade sooner or later, and the release of Phantom Power in 2003 shows that the band's period of creative fervour had come to an end. After all, given everything they'd thrown at the wall in previous years, probably the only way to come up with something still different would have been to betray their own pop spirit, and that clearly wasn't what the quintet had in mind. With Phantom Power, then, begins a string of albums defined by what could be called a "conservative" strategy, built on simply recycling sonic solutions already explored. In this case, moreover, it happens in a particularly lacklustre way, with no real desire to take risks. The Super Furry Animals' stamp is instantly recognisable in the distinctive interplay between sound and voice, but that's as far as it goes: there's no trace of the ambition, the urge to experiment and broaden their own vocabulary, that had been so evident up to this point.

The melodic quality still makes Phantom Power an enjoyable listen, but it doesn't go much further than that.

2004 first saw the resurrection of the Placid Casual label for the release of Phantom Phorce, a remix album of Phantom Power, followed by the inevitable best of, titled Songbook: The Singles Vol. 1, this time for Sony. While it mostly showcases the more conventional side of the band's catalogue, the compilation still offers at least a rough sense of the group's artistic trajectory.

2005 brought Love Kraft, which reveals, right from the cover art, a desire to build something more colourful and unsettling than the previous record. The band only manages to pull off the first of those two goals: the sound is indeed richer, more jagged and even livelier compared to the merely ordinary Phantom Power, so the album manages to shake off that air of fatigue that had crept in just two years earlier. The songs flow with far more freshness and fluidity, there's also more variety and unpredictability, adding up to a solidly decent record overall.

As mentioned above, though, all these good ideas had already been voiced during the band's golden era, so listening to this record is anything but essential.

Love Kraft also marks the band's last release for Sony: with their next record, Super Furry Animals would return to the fold of a major indie label, namely Rough Trade.

As for their first two releases on the legendary London label, Hey Venus! from 2007 and Dark Days/Light Years from 2009, broadly the same verdict given for Love Kraft still holds. It should be said that both records show a good blend between the electric and digital sides of the band's style, even if the balance between these components differs across the two: Hey Venus! leans more electric, while Dark Days/Light Years is more synth-oriented.

The strengths and weaknesses, in any case, are the same ones we can by now call typical of the band's last five years: on one hand, bright melodies, a fresh and vital sound, song development that's always interesting and at times even unpredictable; on the other, a sense of fatigue and deja vu that has by now lingered for far too long.

Sure, one could argue that the urge to keep adding something at all costs risks bringing an unwelcome sense of redundancy to the band's catalogue, but if the quintet actually tried, everyone would probably be willing to forgive a disappointing outcome, simply because the idea of a fresh start would be worth appreciating in itself. In the meantime, though, what remains is a broad discography, always marked by a personal and unmistakable style, that can be enjoyed almost in its entirety. That's no small thing.

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