When Creation Records boss Alan McGee caught Super Furry Animals for the first time in a tiny London club, he handed the Welsh band a record deal and offered them some advice: Write a few songs in English. No one buys Welsh-language music.
Super Furry bassist Guto Pryce remembers being very amused by McGee’s counsel because, "every song he heard that night was in English."
It’s both telling and fortunate that an industry bellwether like Creation Records was willing to take a chance on the Super Furries, despite their inscrutable lyrics and incoherent delivery. To put it mildly, the band’s strength lies in their music, not in their message. Super Furry Animals were introduced to the world via catchy – but mundane – songs about weekend drugs. They’ve since graduated to catchy – but hackneyed and vague - songs about socio-political affairs. The former is excusable in a pop band. The latter is plain exhausting.
What caught the ear of Alan McGee, and what continues to hook thousands of listeners from dozens of different countries is that – despite the limp lyrics – Super Furry Animals are an incredibly compelling, innovative and downright fun psychedelic band. Lead singer Gruff Rhys’ fuzzed-up and woozy vocals are nothing more than a part of the overall sonic experience – inextricably linked to the jagged shards of guitar rock, shades of Seventies arena sensibility, and the light psychedelic country rock leanings of mid-period Byrds. Punch it up with a steady stream of electronic tweaks held over from the band’s earlier techno leanings, and the Super Furry Animals are an irreverent summation of rock history to date - kissing cousins to America’s Elephant Six collective. Lyrics be damned, when the music is that good.
Although he doesn’t want to slight band mate Rhys’ lyrical efforts, Pryce definitely admits that, "sometimes I guess it doesn’t matter much what you sing, as long as it sounds the way you make it sound."
Case in point, the band’s last LP, Mwng. Sung entirely in Welsh, Mwng (Welsh for "mane" as in the mane of a horse; it’s pronounced, "mung") flirted with the United Kingdom’s Top Ten chart and was the most commercially successful Super Furry album to date. No one seemed to mind that, now they really couldn’t understand Gruff’s err… gruff vocals. "I never understood what Kurt Cobain was shouting either," explains Pryce. "But I liked what he was shouting. The emotion was pretty universal. And I enjoy [‘60s/’70s Brazilian band] Os Mutantes, even though I have no idea what they’re saying."
For better and for worse, the Super Furry Animals have shifted back to English on their newest release, Rings Around the World. Viewed one way, Rings is a loose concept album where the concept is little more than a laundry list of liberal causes – communication overload, the death penalty, hubris in Heads of State, and religious zealots. Grating, to say the least, when juxtaposed with the raucous, gleeful atmosphere of the music.
Concentrate a little less on the forest and a little more on the trees, though, and the Super Furries’ latest opus is an amalgamation of delightfully absurdist lyrical nuggets about strange street signs, frighteningly mobile Christians, shooting Doris Day, and a receptacle for the respectable.
Musically, Rings is more like the Super Furry Animals’ sophomore release, Radiator, with it’s infectious pop and ebb-and-flow between genres, and less like LP number three – Guerrilla – which is more of a static album where the band hits a peak and stays there for 40 minutes. Rings moves all the way from delicate, pathos-ridden ballads, to sunny pop gems, to death metal and back again, once even traversing the entire spectrum in a single song – the aforementioned, "Receptacle for the Respectable." Sounds dense on paper, but the Super Furries manage to stretch it out nicely, one genre cascading down (or up) into another with just enough ragged edges between them to keep things interesting. The more subtle musical moments on Rings Around the world are supported by the string arrangements of the High Llamas’ Sean O’Hagan whose work, says Pryce, is "a little warm and a little creepy. It’s more our speed than most of the other string arrangers out there.
"Usually when you get string arrangements done, you get someone who wants to be George Martin and make a Beatles record. And we don’t want that. Sean’s musical approach is very close to ours. And it’s not just dressing with Sean either. He brings something to the mix that fits perfectly, but that we wouldn’t have thought of beforehand."
Perhaps the most strange and wonderful element in the Rings Around the World project is its supporting DVD. Usually, music DVDs are either b-roll concert footage or promotional fodder cut courtesy of a big label budget. At best, they’re interesting to the die-hard fan. The Rings Around the World DVD is a multimedia masterpiece, featuring surround sound, crazy little films for every song on the album, multiple remixes of all the songs, and a labyrinthine navigation system that works like a video game. Don’t have a DVD player? Go buy one for this.
"We wanted to make a record in surround sound because we’d been touring that way for some time," Pryce remembers. "Then, after everyone told us that we couldn’t make a surround sound record, we came up with the idea for a surround sound DVD."
Once the band hit upon that medium to satiate their search for better sound, it opened up a world of creative possibilities. The Super Furries contacted musicians, visual artists and filmmakers to construct visual shorts and remixes for the DVD. According to Pryce, some of these eventual participants were friends, while others were "people we just rang up because we’d seen something of theirs that we liked."
Some of the film shorts are animated; "Receptacle for the Respectable," is directed by Pete Fowler, the man behind the cuddly monster artwork on the covers of Guerrilla and Radiator. Others are live action, low budget pieces with heart and humor, like the film for "Juxtaposed With You" which features a bunch of people dressed up as cardboard cutouts of movie-making implements like a camera and a clapper board.
Super Furry Animals squeezed creativity into every nook and cranny of the DVD, even composing new music especially for the navigation screens. "Every single menu page has a unique piece of music," chuckles Pryce. We really had fun with that part." He pauses, and thinks aloud: "Maybe we’ll release our navigation music as an album."
Centerstage Will Feed You
