Gruff Rhys
Candylion
(Rough Trade) £10.99

The centrepiece of 1951's Festival of Britain was Skylon, a 300ft steel and aluminium 'toothpick' piercing the sky. This audacious, futuristic structure was dismantled and turned into ashtrays just a year later. Skylon also lends its name to an experimental spacecraft and, more contemporarily, the closing 15-minute epic on Candylion, the second solo album from Super Furry Animals singer Gruff Rhys.

The song is only vaguely about the toothpick or the spacecraft. An extended fantasy about a hijacked plane, this loping, genially psychedelic epic finds Rhys sharing an armrest with an unnamed actress. 'Defined myself against everything you stand for/ Now I'm sitting by your side,' he imagines. Then he gets some tweezers and defuses the ticking bomb on board.

Followers of the Furries will be familiar with Rhys's inventiveness and his wide references. Space flight, audacity, retro-futurism, disdain for routine outbursts of national idiocy and a magpie musicality have studded his band's output for a decade.

Rhys's solo output has not disappointed, either. His 2005 debut, Yr Atal Genhedlaeth, was a reliably lovely Welsh-language outing that played largely to the converted. Candylion ups the English content and the ante, stirring Rhys's resonant broth of influences (ELO, Donovan, Brazilian percussion, analogue synth-pop) into winning swirls, of which 'Skylon!' is just one high point. There's also a tune in Patagonian Spanish ('Con Carino'), reminding you that Rhys isn't unduly worried about making immediate sense.

The title track, a plinky-plonky, deceptively light single, doesn't really do the album justice. Rhys's wobbly, Seventies kids' TV noises mask a deeply complex and adult record, often tinged with sadness and brooding about dirty bombs. If the Furries continue to make a virtue of their musical bloodymindedness, however, Rhys is a little mellower on his own.

Here, he adds unbridled beats to a haunting folk song ('Lonesome Words') and double bass and a jazz sway to 'Now That the Feeling Is Gone', as quietly assured as he is experimental. This latest album reconfirms Rhys as both a radical and a beauty, rather like the original Skylon.