Album Reviews

Album Review: Super Furry Animals – Dark Days/Light Years (Rough Trade)

By | Published on Monday 20 April 2009

Super Furry Animals

‘Dark Days/Light Years’, SFA’s ninth album and their second full-length on Rough Trade, gets its physical release in the UK on 16 April, though it’s been floating about in cyberspace since mid-March. The Welsh wonders, surely the most prolific band in all the land, have certainly been keeping themselves out of trouble since the mixed receptions of 2007’s ‘Hey Venus’, with an assemblage of side-projects including Gruff Rhys’s Mercury-nominated Neon Neon, as well as the fancy-Hollywood-type and former SFA member, Rhys Ifans associated ensemble, The Peth. This album, which sees the band renewing their glorious vows of faithfulness to psychedelic pop, has a lot more in common with their surrealist days of yore, than the straighter line that they were walking on their last two studio releases. Well, some folks are just born to be crooked, and hallelujah for that. Since the fantastical oddity of ‘Phantom Power’, the bands output seemed to swoop in and out of mediocrity, rather than soar in the precedential highs. ‘Dark Days/Light Years’ is loaded with the latter. ‘Cardiff In The Sun’, a discussion of the rare meteorological phenomenon, is just one of the vocoder enhanced epics on offer. The best, they saved until last. ‘Pric’ begins life as a gentle bluster before building to a beastly electronic storm – think the edgier, more experimental twin brother of ‘Rings Around The World’. Here, with these looser and more energetic compositions and a turbo-boost of their signature humour, there is no doubt that Wales’ favourite mentalists are back on tank owning, golf cart driving, power ranger helmet wearing bizarro form. MB

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