Super Furry Animals
Hey Venus!
(Rough Trade) £12.99
Were any mortal band to have released as many fine albums as the Super Furries have, they would have withered long ago, leached of all creative juices. With their eighth album in 14 years (not counting side projects and solo ventures), these psychedelic Welsh superheroes continue to shame lesser outfits with their fluency, imagination and easy depths.
Hey Venus! is short and sweet. Just shy of 40 minutes, it condenses all the Furries' accessible instincts into 11 succinct confections, without sacrificing too much bite. As befits an outfit who are no strangers to progressive music, Hey Venus! is something of a concept album too. The band asked Japanese artist Keiichi Tanaami to design the sleeve. They summarised this record to Tanaami as the story of a provincial ingenue - Venus - overwhelmed by life in a megalopolis. She ends up working a stripper, but is saved at the 11th hour.
The cheery songs don't exactly make this bleak plot crystal clear, but it doesn't matter. Lead single 'Show Your Hand' is a marvel of singalong retro, waving Brian Wilson's songbook at the Coral, while a brass band plays in the distance. 'Neo Consumer', by contrast, has a football chant dynamic in the chorus, a foxy time signature in the verse and a bone to pick with a world full of shiny, expensive stuff. Even the sillier cuts are delightful. 'Baby Ate My Eightball' is as zany a bagatelle as they have proffered in a while, but it never relinquishes its stranglehold on a great tune. Rough Trade - SFA's new label - asked for a pop album and it has got one.
Will it change the Super Furries' fortunes, though? Cult bands don't get much more well loved than the Furries, who periodically throw out a hit (like 2003's 'Golden Retriever'). The mass market remains resistant to their charms, even in an alleged soft-rock revival (the Furries were reviving soft rock years ago). On the compact and bijou Hey Venus!, they can't help but repeat sounds that will be familiar to long-serving fans.
Some will miss this band's potent anger or their electronic outbursts. But if ever there was a record to restate the loveliness of the Furries with loud punctuation, Hey Venus! is it.
