Ladies and gentlemen, it’s some time in the distant future. All the results are in and the great music encyclopediast in the sky is compiling his (lets face it – this is a bit of a guy thing) chronological list of the Great UK Rock/Pop Pantheon. So let’s see… 1962-67 – has to be the Beatles really. 68-72 – the great sage scratches his chin, for it’s a tricky one, Floyd, Kinks, Who… but finally he declares in a booming voice - ‘STONES!’. And on it goes… Bowie, The Pistols, Clash, The Smiths etc. etc. until he eventually comes to the murky era sometimes known as the late 90’s-early 00’s.
‘Hmm… well, Blur, Oasis? I think not. Pulp… great , but hmmm... Radiohead? They were good but… God, they are soooo serious and anyhow… I need to relax sometimes. Drink a few banana daiquiris by the pool, maybe have a boogie now and again. So… SUPER FURRY ANIMALS IT IS!’
‘What? The Super Furry Animals?!’ I hear you cry. ‘A few good albums granted but not era defining surely!’. Ok, I am hyperbolizing a little - SFA’s new album, ‘Love Kraft’, is not the best album I have ever heard. But it is that rarest of things – a lovingly made retrograde album that wears its influences proudly on its sleeve but still manages to avoid sounding stale or too mired in the music of the past.
Now let’s get things straight – I am not a fan of nostalgia. Show me ‘Grease’ and I feel ill. Even ‘Sid and Nancy’ leaves me queasy. But I am a fan of pop music and not in a kitsch ‘gee-whiz, ain’t I post-modern’ sense. I genuinely get a kick listening to unashamedly melodic music made solely to appeal to your heart (and ass) rather than your head such as Abba, ELO and others. And there have been many great albums released over the last few years but not many that embrace POP music wholeheartedly without irony or a certain detachment.
Whereas the last generation of UK bands were fairly unanimous in their era of influence - the 60’s (with a soupcon of punk), the more recent batch of bands have been looking to the early 80’s or ‘post-punk’ era for inspiration – Franz F., Bloc Party, Kaiser Chiefs et al. And boy, has it been popular! Much more so than back in the day when the originals of the species like the Gang of Four, Pere Ubu and 23 Skiddoo sold somewhat less than overwhelmingly. But never mind, the newer UK music is quite good in general and sometimes brilliant, even if the music press has been typically OTT in hailing the bands one after the other as the new messiahs.
So where does that leave SFA, a band born in the Brit-pop boom and who take their cues from the late 60’s - early 70’s? The wise thing maybe would have been for them to scale down, punk-up and get an edgier, more spiky, urban sound. And what do they do? They decamp to sunny Andalusia and record one of the most luxurious, brightest pop albums of the year with a 100 voice choir, an orchestra and big splashy swimming pool.
To many SFA have been left behind in the brit-pop era and consigned to the past already - good band, made a few decent albums and faded away. However it looks to this here pundit that this view needs to be seriously revised. Never a huge fan, just a casual one, this boy has been revisiting some of these albums, ‘Rings around the World’ and Phantom Power’ especially and been consistently surprised as to their sonic inventiveness and how well they stand up to repeated listens (believe me, I’m easily bored). Also, finding comparisons with like minded souls, these records more than ablely compare to the more critically lauded Flaming Lips’ recent efforts from the ‘Soft Bulletin’ on.
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The title, referencing perhaps the slightly mad horror writer H.P. Lovecraft, Arthur Lee’s Love and Kraftwerk, doesn’t really give us an indication to what lies within, so let’s dive in. The first thing that hits one is that the album has a very unified feel. Most songs have a downbeat groove slightly reminiscent of Serge Gainsbourg’s masterwork ‘l’Histoire de Melody Nelson’ but far more amiable. There are some up-tempo exceptions – ‘Back on a Roll’, the instrumental ‘Oi Drango’ and the single ‘Lazer Beam’ but in general ‘Love Kraft’ is a mood piece to be listened to in it’s entirety, like a much poppier ‘Astral Weeks’ or ‘Five Leaves Left’.
The album opens (if I was writing in the future I feel I might add ‘famously’) with a hi-fidelity splash and away we go with ‘Zoom!’, a Dylanesque lyric of tall tales with a dreamy, hypnotic quality that permeates much of the album. Also present is the aforementioned choir and a string arrangement by High Llamas’ main man Sean O’ Hagan who gets top marks for his orchestral work throughout the album.
Other highlights - the gorgeous ‘Atomik Lust’, whose words are complete nonsense but who cares when you have sunshine pop as glorious as this - ‘Walk You Home’ which is about as sparse as the album gets, a slow orchestral funk number with great harmony vocals and a perfectly pitched string setting - and ‘Frequency’ which continues the atmospheric European pop feel – think Air, Beck’s ‘Sea Changes’ and ELO’s ‘Concerto for a Rainy Day’.
The flip sides to the lusher numbers on the album are the slightly shambolic, loppity-but-catchy songs such as ‘Psyclone!’, Back On a Roll’ and ‘The Horn’. These don’t work so well as the rest of the album as stand-alone pieces but in the context of the record they work a treat, adding contrast to the overall sonic palette. Also there is a strong instrumental, ‘Oi Frango,’ - infectious and irresistible. The single ‘Lazer Beam’ is good fun and again fits in with the album nicely and the closer, ‘Cabin Fever’, rounds things off perfectly leaving you floating in space awaiting transmission from a friendly interplanetary spacecraft. If there is one thing the album lacks however its a sense of surprise – you never feel as if anything was made in an instant of spontaneous genius or just happened randomly. Its ever so slightly too polished.
But that’s an extremely minor quibble from a fussy fecker like myself. To sum up, ‘Love Kraft’ is one of the finest records I’ve heard this year, finely paced and thoroughly satisfying as a unified work. Its an ‘In a Silent Way’ for pop fans. And while they may not be exactly fashionable, the Super Furry Animals continue in their own quiet way to produce work that is at least as interesting and listenable as to anything else being made in the UK rock scene of today. Long may they prosper.
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