GRUFF RHYS - Hotel Shampoo

Infinitesimal details of a dissociated life, spent in continuous motion from one hotel room to another. This is how the mania develops - not for trashing TV sets or hurling champagne bottles out the window, but - as befits an eccentric Englishman, or rather Welshman, like Gruff Rhys - for hoarding shampoo bottles. Small fragments of a reality, of a past to be rebuilt, and Gruff has actually piled them up in a little house, the kind children retreat into, sheltered from the oppression of a family living room, on behalf of Cardiff's Chapter Arts Centre.

This work, also a kind of therapy for Rhys's little vice, lends its name to the third solo album by the frontman of Super Furry Animals, this time out on Ovni. A much-awaited return after the kaleidoscopic "Candylion", released back in the "distant" 2007 on Rough Trade.

"Hotel Shampoo", just as it was with Super Furry Animals, brings back Rhys's peculiar classicism, delivered with great care for sound and arrangements, yet always with the elegant understatement of someone who's never known how to strike artistic poses. It partly recalls the acoustic glam of "Hunky Dory", and partly the sparkling, never heavy-handed, composure of Cale, all naturally coalescing in the shadow of our man's Wilsonian taste.

Discordant, elusive feelings, buried in memory and only faintly rekindled by the appearance of those small simulacra, hover over "Shark Ridden Waters", the lead single, with that dry groove that later echoes through the 60s pop of "Cristopher Columbus". "I hear footsteps coming from the end of the lean/ The crystal clear shimmering high/ The ghost of the goggles goes izzy pop/A woman that will have you cry": that's how "Hotel Shampoo" opens, on a hazy spider-car excursion through the winding recesses of old stories, amid hotel samples and a past that invariably blurs into the present.

Still, you can sense this is a mature work from the sheer number of, so to speak, "normalized" ballads ("Take A Sentence" and "At The Heart Of Love" above all, beautifully arranged over a piano bed from which strings and horns blossom), yet enlivened by Rhys's lyrics full of wit and, above all, by our man's still-dazzling melodic instinct. So much so that "Hotel Shampoo" features a song Gruff wrote for none other than Britney Spears ("Honey All Over"), here turned into a divertissement tied to the most psychedelic side of the Beatles.

The record decisively shows off its "auteur pop" credentials, in the truest sense of the term, with artistic ambitions that carry no trace of snobbery. Gruff hopes his "Shark Ridden Waters" will one day be covered by Shakira, and we're inclined to believe he means it sincerely.

It's the oblique Latin flavour of "Sensations In The Dark", its dazed charm, that wins over the listener, presenting them with a work that's accessible without ever selling itself short.

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10/02/2011