SUPER FURRY ANIMALS

I just watched the making of RATW video and there were three points that i found revealing:

1. They wanted to make an album for and of the bong smoking, Playstation2 gamer culture. That I suppose encourages introspection and immersion with the lowest possible stakes, with a vision field limited to the widest possible screen.

2. That Gruff was obsessed with albums like What's Goin On, Sign O The Times and Welcome to the Pleasuredome that attempted to define the era.

On the one hand, it wants to change the world, on the other, it doesn't want to get off the couch. So RATW belongs to this genre of overambitious, failed pop, which I always sorta knew, but that sense of failure is hard-wired into the album concept. It's a hopelessly grandiose project couldn't possibly succeed in communicating everything it intends to. So you end up with a gesture that's overly dramatic and exaggerated but very unclear. I don't know what kind of point '(Drawing) Rings...' has to make about cloning sheep, for example- just wanted to throw that in there.

Which is fine, i certainly don't need it to be topical or make any kind of clear statement. Actually the very thing I love so much about Guerrilla- how plotless it is, how structurally chaotic, like a Marx Bros. movie, a series of hollow gags. How it revels in its own disposability. It's "Superflat".

But with RATW, the weight and the grandiosity of it is very inefficient. It's just an all-encompassing width. I miss the mania very much.

3. Chris Shaw explaining that in order to accommodate the natural quirks of Gruff's singing, he made sure that the backround vocals were pitch-perfect and even sort of coerced Bunf into singing a CS&N-style center harmony part.

I def experience the harmonies on this record as more of a blend, more focused and more chordal than what they usually do... Which is for each voice to go off on its own tangent, basically. And that's an extension of how they work as a group. Everyone pulling in different directions, away from the center, not really working together but setting up distractions and highlighting the individual voices and textures. That disunity is what I'd loved so much about their arrangements.

You're all nuts :)

Like 'the background vocals need to create a solid bed for the lead singer's voice' is absolutely the wrong approach for this band imo

For me the most exciting thing about this band was like, where is this going to go next, what are they going to do next time. That ended with RATW i guess because its all-out maximalism forces a reversal, boxes them into a corner. But also because it drew so much on their existing vocabulary, the obvious next step was to downplay the novel element.

i feel like youre talking about all the albums after RATW. They were staid, boring, and overripe to me. i do like the chaotic elements in the earlier albums for sure. i just feel like RATW is were you get the vertical tetris bar and WHAMMO.

^ lol exactly what I was gonna say. Totally agree with deflator's last post IF it's talking about post-RATW

Oh, I think they were going for something more like the chicken dream sequence in GTA5 than Tetris. A little higher-tech.

Trying to imagine a 5.1 mix of Korobeiniki

they're maybe the only band that never made a double album that really should have

would have really suited their most sprawling chaotic side as seen on guerrilla & it's not like they weren't prolific enough

well the problem with guerrilla imo is that they didn't go for it enough (which tbf they rectified with RATW)

guerrilla is their most wild stylistic grab bag album, with a bunch of tracks that are just sonic experiments more than anything else, and even the pop songs are relatively disparate stylistically

and then on ratw they really successfully combined the two approaches, leaning towards the pop side of their songwriting over pure experimentation, but successfully incorporating all the sonic experimentation into the songs themselves more directly too

I'd never heard, or realized, that about the harmonizing. It's interesting that the rest of the band started releasing their own songs after RAtW, to varying degrees of interest and success.

Cian harmonizes with Gruff beautifully. Their pairing on “Download” is sublime.

going for it = fleshing the experimentation out into full-blown compositions with greater narrative complexity, length, scope etc, yes

Bunf's background vocals are the most off in their own little world, like his part on Baby Ate My 8 Ball is an imitation of the ambulance coming for the baby.

Sticking him in the center of a chordal harmony is just... What??

P sure "Download" is Cian's song and he also has songs on Guerrilla and RATW (a couple co-written with Bunf)

Yeah some tracks on Guerrilla are songwriting experiments presented in varying stages of incompletion. I like this in part because they are freeform and defy conventional structure. Do not agree with this idea that the experimentation is subordinate, must serve the songwriting, or ultimately the end goal is integration into "full blown compositions" which unfortunately means conventional song structures.

Looking at the tracklist for Guerrilla, the ones that are "just sonic experiments" basically = Cian's songs.

Wherever I lay my phone, Some Things come from nothing, The door to this house and Chewing Chewing gum are the ones that are Cian's or mainly Cian's, as well as all the interludes obv.

He wasn't really "writing songs" - he was developing these tracks which were kind of formless, which creates a challenge but also opens up possibilities to create new kinds of sstructures and song forms. Which is what I wish they'd done.

It seems like what changed after Guerrilla is the way they work with his tracks- instead of treating them as standalone songs, they incorporated them into other songs (Slow Life) or built songs on top of them (Lazer Beam).

Also, Cian started writing more structured songs on piano and deloped fewer tracks on a sampler.

Looking back, using their solo back catalog as a map, Bunf appears to be the Super Furry Animal that possesses the older songwriting methodology. I hear more of the early sound in his writing than the others.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q78h4fuFc-k

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MwS8bvd8BLw

He's probably less capable of writing a fully-realized ballad or 2-minute pop hit, but I think he's the least tethered--agreeing with the concept his harmonies were kind of out in space compared to Cian's. I think his A-sides/B-sides from Phantom Power on are the sloppiest, but some of the most interesting.

I don't think Bunf songwriting is much of a factor in their early stuff, he was generally (mis)taken to be the lead guitarist in early press, his best guitar parts tend to be wayward contrapuntal lines that add harmonic tension, much like his backing vox- the buried fuzz gtr in Northern Lites is a good example. Afaict this is his important contribution.

Cian takes up a lot of space with chromatics on some of those songs, his parts can be bold and deliberate and push against the grain. Sean O's strings on 'Turning Tide' are able to kind of tiptoe around the chromatics but I think he asserts himself more from RATW.

Like Cian's musical voice tends to be a lot leaner and more aqueous than Gruff's, which is rounder and more full bodied. Much like their singing voices and their physical bodies... Idk whether this is a factor in their music sounding more or less "fleshed out", probably not what was meant but Cian's ideas tend not to ve very fleshy

Sinewy *maybe*

Def spidery. He's their Spiderman.

Impressed with Chris Shaw's ability to carve the space for certain textures to rip your head off in these very busy mixes, i can see why he's so proud of his work on this stuff

Wherever I Lay My Phone is easily my favourite thing on Guerrilla - it allows the sonic experiment to play itself out for six minutes and build into something anthemic, an instinct they'd shown before obviously and one they'd revisit a lot more on RATW. I don't think putting the sonics into song-structures worked against their interest value. I'd argue SFA's strengths revolve around their interpretations of pop music!

I can understand that.

I like "let's get juxtaposed, juxtaposed" as a subversion of "let's get physical, physical" for example.

To me their strength was in pulling away from the song-center, that's what I feel is most essential and unique to their approach... so relegating the center to something like a perspective point would be a logical conclusion.

I guess I'm more interested in the ability of their experiments to disrupt than cohere.

Otoh my fave sfa track is prob Mountain People which does exactly what you're saying. I don't like any of their other tilting wave machine tracks nearly as much tho.

Can't really choose between Ice Hockey Hair and Slow Life, to absolutely nobody's surprise

Ice Hockey Hair would be my second or third choice. Genuinely surprized to realize that two of their most anthemic tracks are my favorites, it is not a quality I tend to prefer.

Mountain People wasn't always a favorite mind you. As best I remember, the crazy synth riff and dissonant guitar anti-solo at the end of Herman <3's Pauline was the first thing that really hooked me as a pissed off 14 y/o.

I had a cassette of Fuzzy Logic before that but wasn't into it.

It's cute that after giving Ron Mael a shoutout on Fuzzy Logic and sticking his portrait in the liners, they reasserted their appreciation for Sparks by writing a song about Einstein's patents on the next one.

I think the celebratory element was something I tolerated more than enjoyed at the time, for the most part. It was all about the comic and charicatured expressions of rage.

They were certainly very good at channeling this anger into fun, collective release

Deflatormouse I took maybe 4 mos off ilx, but in poking my nose back in, and immed learning more than i can absorb, i suppose— that’s why i’m here 19 years after greenspun stuff. Ppl here often really know, and can explain. (RATW is still apotheosis lol).

They were my favorite band from the time I was 13 to 17-ish. I've had almost 25 years to think about why and I'm still figuring it out lol

I def share the deranged, antic sense of humor so that's part of it. But I'm really bad at processing my emotions so I'll probably never figure it out. That might be one of the reasons I was drawn to this band, their approach to dealing with emotions could be very indirect.

https://podfollow.com/1566723156/episode/284bd5820a835740a4d52e0b8e8ed7dd22e00cde/view

Fairly interesting convo with Guto & Cian. Cian's audio is pretty bad, but listenable enough.

Just picked up the long-overdue vinyl reissue of Rings Around the World. It’s been many years since I’ve listened to this album front to back, and I had all but forgotten what an end to end masterpiece it is. Even the songs I don’t love really _work_ in the context of the album. Sequencing FTW.

Altho for my money, the CD version with the back-to-back punch of “Tradewinds/Roman Road” is even better than the original album proper.

Only noticed more recently how Fragile Happiness is one of their best songs

The instrumentals are fun to listen to, just to really hear what they threw at this thing:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xEtU9GQwUbk

(they released an additional 'disc' last Friday with all the demos, etc.)

Think juxtaposed comes out particularly well.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQx78IMM3DY

“Acoustic” mix of Tradewinds is so lovely, wow

We'll go to Miami
Take old friends and family
We'll stay out and party
Does Will Smith lie?
Does he ever cave in and cry?

One of the weirdest things I've discovered from all the reissues & rarities:

They'd been working on "John Spex" since the Guerrilla sessions and somehow ended up turning it into "Lazer Beam," easily the worst SFA single ever and runner-up for worst SFA song in general.

I think they could've turned it into something cool. the LFO & Danger Mouse remixes were all right.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DG7BxOUIYJY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rvyPrlYPm0Q

I think they had something...

"Point your random finger at the sky" always stuck out as a weird lyric. Now I see it's based on the sample in the second outtake.

Def. one of SFA's biggest failures. I could never suss out a good melody or idea in the song. At one point I imagined a nice cosmic guitar solo in place of the "We will conquer utopia with space chariots" bit and thought that might lead the song somewhere.

https://thepalebluedots1.bandcamp.com/album/lots-of-dots-2?fbclid=IwAR0uLj0ypugR3T4IiMoI-0GeYidAMhH4_F_LYWPsOK4A5Jr-bevVqx-IasA

My favorite side project. Insta-buy.

Pale Blue Dots album is out in a couple days. Looks like just a few copies left.

http://thepalebluedots1.bandcamp.com/releases

This new track that features Gruff is quite nice:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zX9V838P76I

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LFezk2G-lp8

Well, Bunf just managed to release the best SFA-related thing since SFA were around.

Two and a half weeks later - by far Bunf's best song, aside from "White Socks/Flip Flops." I need an entire album that sounds like "Thermos." He even finally got his voice sounding a little less shaky.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UtNeuXVqvi4

Cian harmonizes with Gruff beautifully. Their pairing on “Download” is sublime.

― afriendlypioneer, Monday, September 6, 2021 3:23 PM (four months ago) bookmarkflaglink

Cousins. Which adds a further layer to their obsession with The Beach Boys.

I'm all about Bunf right now.

Thermos is so good.

The first song ever recorded as Super Furry Animals, featuring actor, Rhys Ifans on lead vocals revealed by the band with time-limited, Bandcamp release: Of No Fixed Identity

Former lead singer and friend of the band, Ifans, performed the track in the studio in 1993 before taking the path towards a Hollywood career

Left in band archives for almost thirty years, the Bandcamp-only, one-week release emerges in support of the www.crowdjustice.com/case/save-the-severn-estuary/ campaign.

The song that started it all for Super Furry Animals and kept under wraps for almost thirty years, Of No Fixed Identity, featuring actor, Rhys Ifans on vocal duties has been surprise released by the band – but it’s only available strictly from Bandcamp and for a very limited time only.

https://superfurryanimals.bandcamp.com/releases

Never knew that stuff was recorded or that Gruff was in the band at the same time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1m7w6P75Gqs

I am loving this new track. It’s SFA all the way.

Looks like Das Koolies are going for it. 15 track album in September. Not a single song from the released EP or singles to date.

https://www.qobuz.com/nz-en/album/dk01-das-koolies/tkpgobxtyr2ob