Super Furry Animals: 'Hey Venus'

How dependable Super Furry Animals are, producing an album every two years or so, guaranteed to be overlooked by the bulk of the public, briefly reviewed with favour by the music press and then gleefully absorbed for years to come by their committed but insubstantial fan-base. In an age of indie cool, it is hard to see where SFA fit in. Briefly considered rebellious, for being Welsh and never aligning properly with the zeitgeist of the 90s, they have remained difficult to categorise or position in relation to their contemporaries.

'Hey Venus' has a staggeringly ugly cover and a repertoire of songs that seems to effortlessly continue the trend for churning out songs that live up to and continue their ever expanding back-catalogue. The theme is a kind of warped psychedelia (mind you, was it ever anything else?) informed by outlandishness and psychic exploration but never far from the discipline of good pop-song writing.

We kick off with a fantastical intro track, the energetic 'Gateway Song', which opens out to a series of well constructed mini epics. Some of them more pastoral and whimsy ('Show Your Hand', 'The Gift That Keeps Giving') and others more fulsome ('Run Away', 'Neo Consumer'). The ideas run thick and fast and every song is party to a substantial number, as though it simply isn’t good manners to try and build a track out of anything else, even if it will only be listened to by a handful of people. At times the purpose in the guitar lines is like a pencil tearing through paper in cerebral enthusiasm.

I couldn’t stop playing 'Battersey Odyssey', which is a bizarre, somewhat peerless episode with probably fewer ideas than others on the album but with a floating joy in silliness that can only come from an absence of the need to prove oneself. 'Let The Wolves Howl At The Moon' closes the affair, sounding like The Band playing to a bar at closing time. "The end it comes too soon" Rhys sings, and he’s right.
Released 27th August 2007 by Rough Trade.

Written by Huw Green.