Super Furry Animals - Dark Days, Light Years

ALBUM TALK: A little while ago I wrote about the Fleet Foxes, and I had some problems with their generally lovely sound. It was too close to the sources it was taken from, so you wondered, despite its beauty, why you shouldn’t just listen to the originals. Now I’m going to put my head on the block again, and argue that another album that is at least as beautiful, and is born of some old music too, is worth treating in quite a different way.

SUPER FURRY ANIMALS

DARK DAYS, LIGHT YEARS

The Super Furry Animals’ “Dark Days, Light Years” comes from a really idiosyncratic musical world. I have been a fan of this band for more than ten years, and I’ve seen them produce folk, punk, massive prog rock and hard electronica. This new album, their ninth record, gives you a strange sensation right from the beginning. Echoes from the past - the roots of the albums – late 70s disco at times, or 80s hair metal, or psychedelia - can be heard to converge here. It’s a crazed concoction, all their own.



SFA are a band who play complex, moving music while holding the slightest of wry smiles as they do it. My brother-in-law listened to the opening track (“Crazy Naked Girls”) with me recently, and seemed slightly irritated by that smile. He felt the outlandish humor of it was contrived, because the huge shredding guitar solos that run through it were really compelling, but SFA were too cool to admit it.

Perhaps that’s true, but I think it’s fair to say that SFA never smirk at us as they play. The humor is offset by the beauty of the harmonies on a track like “Moped Eyed,” or the swirling eight-minute build of tracks like “Cardiff in the Sun,” which is too euphoric to be just a joke. They are serious about music, but they know that without the humor they would quickly become way too serious to be digestible by the rest of us.



Let me say that “Dark Day, Light Years” is certainly not SFA’s best. That would have to go to either “Guerilla” (1999) or “Phantom Power” (2003). But by comparison - their efforts are far better than the best we ever hear from most band. This is not an average band.



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A look back @ SFA's Mwng album

Comments

Anonymous said…
Best Furries are Radiator, Guerrilla or Mwng. Everything after Mwng (including RingsAround the world & PP) just can't compare. Still a good band, but everything seems a bit more forced and less spontaneous

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