Super Furry Animals - 'Songbook' (Sony)
5/5
By: Toby L
Cripes almighty. The most salacious, decent, compelling, diverse and immortally inventive pop band since The Beatles. And barely anyone still buys their bloody records.
Super Furry Animals; Welsh wizards; multi-coloured, techno tank drivers; poets; scholars; piss-takers; arch stoners; Yeti fetishists; Howard Marks buddies; finest singles band of a generation.
The sheer dynamic of SFA is not so much a triumph as a revelation, a gift. The quintet have spent just under a decade subverting and confounding - and writing songs that endure and warm. Giddy pop intrusion, unashamed in lyrical chortling and almost cripplingly unfashionable themes - El Nino, anyone? Or pet-dog golden retrievers? Matched with a soundtrack so temperamental, fidgeting, you're as likely to hear campfire balladry, punk-soul fusions and steel-drum bolstered calypso Tropicana in the same, highly entertaining sitting.
Well, at least you are with the arrival and mirth of their 'Songbook - The Singles Volume One' collection; a dainty, not-so-unrewarding comprising of the fuzzy strumpets' 45s to date. And let's get it out as soon as possible in case you're anticipating a sting in the tail - it's boss. Not. One. Shoddy. Song. In sight.
Gruff-Rhys and friends enchant and humour from the off - the sparkly euphoria of a drugs-lording 'Something For The Weekend' - and then melt instantaneously with a following 'It's Not The End Of The World', as pertinent and as moving as it gets in this current, troublesome, tawdry world climate. And - then - shock of shocks, the band's most recent stuff doesn't shift our attention either (hell knows former, fellow Creation label-mates Oasis would have trouble attesting to that in any impending 'best of') - the orchestral/rave sweep of 'Slow Life', or glimmering swaths of 'Hello Sunshine' ('I'm a minger/You're a minger, too/So come on minger/I want to ming with you' - genius): proof that never once has the band truly faltered.
The classics that provide the most illustrious of gob-smacking glory, however - the still-unbelievable strum-anarchy of 'The Man Don't Give A F**k', quite, quite majestic lounge-indie suaveness of 'Ice Hockey Hair', an almost achingly anthemic 'If You Don't Want Me To Destroy You', and the career-standout - 'Demons': a creeping five minutes of Havana horns, acoustic yearning and the most soulful outing to date from Cardiff's weirdest. Truly, if anything sounds better, we've yet to hear it.
All this, while the band muster another new studio-album - their seventh in almost as many years. As prolific as disease, may there never be a cure to the inane insanity of these frantically inspired creatures.
Artists in this article: Super Furry Animals
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