Super Furry Animals

For Wales, the 90s represent the equivalent of a full-blown renaissance, after a punishing dark age from which only Young Marble Giants and a handful of others managed to overcome the darkness, earning the right to poke their noses outside the front door (metaphorically speaking, of course...). Monumentally important in this respect is the birth of Ankst Records (1988), a true "beacon in the night" to which bands of varied backgrounds but shared psychedelic intentions look hopefully: Ether, Gorky's Zygotic Mynci, Llwybr Llaethog, Ectogram. Within a few years, the Cardiff scene becomes the object of desire for the music press. The Welsh musicians themselves, much like their counterparts in Seattle, take pride in the isolation imposed by communities such as Newport and Blackpool, places worlds apart – in mentality even more than geography – from the nerve centres of British popular music at the time (London, Manchester, Bristol), and therefore free from any external pressure or internal competition.

Just as in the birthplace of grunge during the second half of the 80s, it's the lack of any concrete mainstream outlet that allows musicians to play without "performance anxiety", pushing them instead to cluster into micro-scenes which, while sharing a genetic soft spot for the word pop, dare to irreverently rewrite the sacred texts of indie and psych-folk, as well as tinker with noise, hip-hop and electronics. But the list of sub-genres and names would be far longer (and more scattershot): from the glam-streaked epic wave of the Manic Street Preachers to the steroid-pumped jangle-pop of Catatonia, from the somewhat coarse brit-rock of Stereophonics (praised for a few months as the new Oasis, with decent success here in Italy too) to the "post-Replacements" punk of 60ft, there really is something for everyone.

Radio 1's live broadcast of the entire Cardiff Bay Big Noise Festival (11 May 1997), fittingly preceded by the "Made In Wales" special, sounds like the definitive acknowledgement, after months of press coverage, of a varied and vital reality – one not to be pitted against the "official" scene, but rather placed alongside it.

Tied closely enough to the mother ship to earn the label of "locals", Super Furry Animals nevertheless manage to sidestep the trap of provincialism thanks to a versatility that took them from being a "techno unit" devoted to the situationist pranksters KLF (the ultimate subversives of British acid-house) all the way to the stages of Glastonbury, guitars and distortion pedals in hand. A versatility that also allowed them to break free from strictly Welsh-language vocals (not without accusations of betrayal from scene purists) and sign to Alan McGee's Creation, all in the most natural and painless way possible. Equally natural is the schizophrenic inventiveness of a music that would take hours to describe, so vast is the wealth of references that has allowed the band to master the idea of pop as pastiche.

"Radiator" (Creation, August 1997) arrives at a peculiar moment for the entire brit scene. After the collective euphoria of 1994-1996, britpop goes through a relatively shadowy phase, during which many of its key players remodel their sound around new principles of darkness and urgency (needless to point out that, once again, Suede got there first: "Dog Man Star", a dark-baroque gem, was released right as the thousand colours of parklife were still in full swing outside). The watchword is to break away from now well-worn paths and find new routes: some do, like Blur, by steeping their songwriting in the production values of American lo-fi; others, like Radiohead, shelve arena-rock and push their writing's depressive streak and prog quirks to the extreme, all seasoned with a futuristic/oppressive, "1984"-style imagery (the following year it would even be Pulp stepping into a hyper-technological Salò with a work of searing cynicism and cruelty, "This Is Hardcore", widely considered their masterpiece).

In truth, the britpop crowd simply seems to be grappling with repressed fears surfaced by the darker "electronic" undercurrents of the era, namely techstep and trip-hop; a trip-hop that, right in 1997, turns into paranoia tout court ("Pre-Millennium Tension" by Tricky, "Mezzanine" by Massive Attack), and goes hand in hand with the "acid" broadsides of the new "big beat" standard-bearers Chemical Brothers (the most genuinely psychedelic and visionary) and Prodigy (the most genuinely laddish).

Everywhere, in short, there's a whiff of sonic acid and tension under the skin. Even the Primal Scream single "Kowalski", released in May, betrays a malaise that goes beyond the simple "anarchic" escapism suggested by its nods to the road movie "Vanishing Point": like a meaner, nastier version of "Loaded", the track paves the way for free-form hysterics, tar-thick synth noise, and a tight rhythm, with Gillespie's whispered vocals adding a dash of devilish spice to the mix. Not exactly the pills of bliss swallowed between the grooves of "Screamadelica"...

Even though it teems with humour and good vibrations (the basic ingredients of the Welsh scene), "Radiator" too can't be said to be entirely immune to this "malevolent" atmosphere. The first clue is right there in front of us, in Pete Fowler's wonderful cartoon artwork: an adorable teddy bear admires its reflection in a red shop window, but its mirrored image sports two little devil horns instead of ears, and the smiley face on the drink it's holding is replaced by a black skull. Such references seem to allude, not all that subtly, to the issue of the rave scene's degeneration, in particular the shift from the euphoria of the post-1988 scene to its darkside (4 Hero's "Mr. Kirk's Nightmare" still echoes in the ears), whose effects, at the time, seemed far from having been absorbed by the "night people". Chemical Brothers' own "Lost In The K-Hole" ("K" for ketamine) likewise brings to the surface, in a mix of celebration and dread, the implications of total surrender to the "chemical" gospel, especially at a time when much of the rock audience was watching the rave scene's ups and downs with interest or, in many cases, getting thoroughly swept up in it.

It's precisely the good/evil dichotomy, a fundamental topos of psychedelia as of every other drug-based culture, that seems to reverberate here—albeit in a decidedly more playful and less demanding way (though that's implicit, given we're dealing with five super-furry little animals!)—both in the album's themes (demons, chupacabras, spies breathing down your neck) and in its recording techniques. The latter, in particular, often favour an atypical, dance-inflected approach: how else to describe the disorienting, breakbeat-like drumming of "The Placid Casual", with cymbals that literally seem to scatter across the sound spectrum like a virus? Or the kick drum that transforms a Blur-style novelty tune like "Hermann ♥'s Pauline" into dazzling techno-rock?

It's no coincidence that "Radiator" represents the perfect meeting point between experimental approach (read: electronic and/or psychedelic) and pop warmth: an extremely catchy blend of power pop, deviant (and deviated) synths, jazzy Rhodes, guitars that are by turns lacerating and caressing, folk sketches, alienating choruses, all "graced" with an eighth place in the UK charts (their best placing up to that point). The songwriting, too, is at its absolute peak: complex, multifaceted, yet sinuously "sticky", as in all pop worthy of a capital P. Worth mentioning here is the masterpiece "Demons", the album's songwriting peak and one of the most beloved classics among the band's die-hard fans. On a record that oozes technology from every pore, "Demons" casts a glance back at a certain strand of rock's past—the cosmic folk ballads straddling the Sixties and early Seventies, the ones about the greater Toms floating around the Moon, to put it plainly. Singer Gruff Rhys's Gabriel-esque, sharp and husky delivery, and the grace of the arrangement (surging trumpets, spacey keyboards, the odd curl of banjo) make it one of the anthem tracks of that epic, tragic and disillusioned end-of-century mood—the same mood as the contemporaneous "Ok Computer", of course X-rayed here through the vividly coloured lenses of the Welsh band.

More characteristic and better integrated into the album's context is the single "Play it Cool", with its acid pop set to an almost rap-like cadence (even the scratch solo betrays its hip-hop ancestry), or the brilliant electro-acoustic doodle "The International Language Of Screaming", buffeted about by electrical anomalies. The aforementioned "Hermann ♥'s Pauline" is more acid-drenched psychedelia, crackling with electronic textures and studio sleight of hand; it's pop synthesized in a laboratory, amid alembics giving off dangerous coloured bubbles and comical synth signals resembling whistles and cymbal storms. Even the lyrics call back to science, to the radiation of Marie Curie and Albert Einstein (the title's two characters are her parents). Despite its modern sheen, the underlying structure remains that of good old Sixties pop, with its march-like choruses and its choirs brimming with youthful enthusiasm disguised as childlike naivety.

Cut from the same flower-power cloth is "She's Got Spies", a lullaby that flips on its head at the chorus, where in the space of an instant a lively round of Free Design-style sunshine-pop harmonies takes shape, chasing each other's tails beneath the din of roaring distortion. It was the Nineties after all, wasn't it? And what of "Chupacabras"? A punk-rock bastardised with samples that, in a minute and a half, crams in a considerable amount of melodic and sonic ideas, without ever taking itself seriously for a single second.

The album's final stretch trades the immediacy of what came before for a trio of more expansive tracks: the folk-hard-glam of "Down A Different River"; the melancholy piano sonata "Download", drawn into a delicate whirl of tremolo; and a Creedence Clearwater Revival-style ballad with a noisy symphonic muddle to close, "Mountain People"—a finale worthy of one of the strangest and most outrageously creative albums of its era.

Among the heavyweights of Britpop, yet never mentioned when people rack their brains to reel off the usual three names (the one starting with "b", the one starting with "o", and that other one starting with "p"...), Super Furry Animals proved that the lifeblood of Nineties Anglo-Saxon pop could pulse even outside the narrow circle of "cool Britannia", forcing many people (at least those who deigned to open their eyes) to take a broader, more all-encompassing view of the phenomenon.

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27/06/2010