NYLON - January 2008 - (Page 122) THE BIRTH OF VENUS With their latest LP, the Super Furry Animals’ long, strange trip continues. By Jonathan Durbin. Photographed by Clarke Tolton For sing-along-style rock ’n’ roll, it’s difficult to beat the Super Furry Animals. The Welsh band has honed their harmonies and wry lyrical skill into a fine, Zappa-esque edge on their latest record, Hey Venus!, especially with a song called “Baby Ate My Eightball.” It’s an upbeat, summery number, about, yes, a baby that eats an eightball. After describing the infant frothing at the mouth, vocalist Gruff Rhys sings sweetly: “Mental note to self/ Keep in safe place away from harm.” As an anti-drug PSA, it isn’t particularly effective, but it is—as are most Super Furries songs— alarmingly catchy. Hey Venus! is the most lucid collection of the band’s career, remarkable for both its restraint and cheery appeal. Unlike earlier efforts that, at times, breached the limits of indie-pop’s patience, this latest pastiche of warm psychedelia is entirely friendly, and entirely sung in English (the Super Furries released Mwng back in 2000, a dreamily atmospheric Welshlanguage record whose song titles—“Pan Ddaw’r Wawr,” “Dacw Hi”—read like clues from a Wookie-approved acrostic.). Hey Venus! is also funny. Clocking in at 43 seconds, opener “The Gateway Song” is a breezy, tongue-in-cheek number that alludes to drugs: “This song is the gateway song. . . brings us up nicely to the harder stuff/ And once you get hooked, you can’t get enough.” Elsewhere, themes take a turn for the bitter, as on “Neo Consumer,” a radio-friendly swipe at mall culture, and “Battersea Odyssey,” a sunny showtune in which Rhys sings “The future ain’t what it should have been.” “All the songs on the record are based on people we know and on real events,” Rhys says. “So any resemblance to people we know, that’s pretty accurate. We invented this character named Venus to deflect our friends getting their feelings hurt.” The 38-year-old describes the record as a loose narrative, following the misadventures of Venus as she moves from small town to the big city. The second track is “RunAway,” the album’s first single, which opens with a spoken word epithet: “This song is based on a true story, which would be fine, if it wasn’t autobiographical.” In the video, a man hits a woman with his car, leaving her with amnesia; he brings her home to recover, only to be punched in the jaw by her husband. Rhys says the clip is a soap opera that fits neatly with the album’s story arc. If Rhys sounds puckish, his band has earned the honor. They formed in Cardiff, Wales, in the early ’90s. After releasing two EPs, Creation Records founder and British music mogul Alan McGee signed the Super Furries to his label. As the apocryphal story goes, McGee extended his offer after watching the band play a show, recommending only that in the future they sing more songs in English. He was promptly told that, in fact, all of the songs that night had been in English. Several albums followed, including their remarkable debut, Fuzzy Logic. After Creation’s demise, the band continued to expand its range, from the experimental (Rings Around the World) to the more reserved (Phantom Power). Comprised of Rhys, Huw Bunford (guitar), Guto Pryce (bass), Cian Ciaran (keyboards) and Dafydd Leuan (drums), the Super Furry Animals became renowned for their costumed live shows and anarchic glee. The latter hasn’t changed as they’ve aged: Rhys says that originally, when the quintet had settled
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