33 rebellions per minute
"Throw a coin into my plastic satellite dish and make a wish"
1996
Super Furry Animals, FUZZY LOGIC
Another part of the superb recent crop of Welsh bands, also including
Gorky's Zygotic Mynci and Lazer Boy. SFA are more traditional, despite
their fondness for weird radar and trashcan and tuned static noises.
What they sound like, essentially, is if Paul McCartney and the late
John Lennon got together and penned their best set of tunes since the
ABBEY ROAD/ SGT PEPPER glory days, then agreed to give the songs an
equally inventive set of production tricks if, and only if, the
instrumental arrangements and performances were handled by Pulp. Thus, a
certain comfortable glam-rock strut or decadently adept string-section
usage, plus a certain competent limitedness to the playing, unites an
impressive variety of really neat, whistleable tunes.
"Something For The
Weekend", with its hectic piano-chord-driven verses (about some
horrifying medical condition turning the singer into a hippie) leading
into a smooth love-song chorus, is one of my favorite catchy bits of
Carnaby Street pop this decade. The more aggressive "Ba ba ba ba"s of
"Bad Behavior" aren't far behind. The subtle relationship song "If You
Don't Want Me To Destroy You" slows enough to let Gruff Rhys sing a
particularly ambitious melody, while "For Now And Ever" and "Long Gone"
concentrate on atmosphere and effect--- one of my e-acquaintances
considers "Long Gone" the most harrowing song since Lisa Germano's "...A
Psychopath", which I don't see myself, but the moodiness and effects and
eerie voices are comparable.
Most of the voices on the album, Gruff's and Huw Bunford's, are like
Lennon and McCartney but 5 times as adorable. Lyrics are comparable,
too, but Lennon seems to have used his death for both modest
vocabulary-building exercises and for generating practical ideas. So one
song is about using hamster wheels to replace fossil fuel, and another
song has him "struggling in a vortex with a jacket made of Gortex--- it
fits wonderfully!". And instead of lambasting God, FUZZY LOGIC
optimistically asks "God, Show Me Magic!". And clarifying, 3 songs
later, that this might include "riding a unicorn", but they would prefer
not to "be backwards-born". When you futz around with magic, it pays to
make sure you do good with it when the spells kick in. Reincarnate, for
example, but only under controlled conditions.
1999
Super Furry Animals, GUERRILLA
Hey. You. Floss your teeth everyday. Visit the dentist every six months and let his hygienist scrape the existing plaque from your mouth. You've been told this before: now just do it. If I'd had the willpower to do that, instead of getting frustrated and quitting every time the floss broke between my crammed-tightly-together teeth, I wouldn't be facing three more appointments for fillings and an impending final bill (two checkups plus eleven cavities filled) close to $1000. The question I'm left with is, why couldn't someone have written some catchy song explaining the need to do this? Face it, the only pro-flossing propaganda I ever faced outside the dental office was mouthed by a complete nerd, Ida in the Kudzu comic strip, which hasn't been funny enough to read in nearly a decade. While all this time, pop songwriters blab six gazillion viewpoints about love, sex, work, and capitalism: stuff I'd think about without their help, thank you.
I nominate Super Furry Animals to write the flossing song that will save the next generation of impressionable youth. They have, you see, already proven their talent for helpfulness. No one I have played "Chewing Chewing Gum" for, so far, has taken more than two listens to find their brains stuck on replay of "Don't go chewing in bed/ you might end up with gum stuck in your hair" - helpful advice based on bandmember Cian Ciaran's real life experiences. It's insidious, frankly: this lilting melody in boyishly broad Welsh accent, repeated as part of a busy four-part harmony round. The astonishing thing is the roadblocks SFA almost seem to put in the way of the catchiness: the backwards piano and drums, the insectoid guitar rhythms, a building organ overload, the interlocking (though mutually supporting) words. Still, it's a pop song, and it burrows.
SFA fought the notion of pop energetically. If their debut's "Something For The Weekend" and "Hamster Song" were blatantly infectious, there were already signs of impending space-out experimentation in the other songs, and second album RADIATOR ('97) was a dramatic stylistic leap into the abstract. It was taken from me by Greyhound Bus Lines before I really got to explore it, but aside from a token suggestion that the album sounded exactly like the Olivia Tremor Control's BLACK FOLIAGE (yes, you're welcome), the best summary I manage is "exploded pop songs". RADIATOR sounded like a collection of psychedelic-era Monkees ditties, sliced and drowned, then draped separately to dry over an experimental album that's part Gong-style Moog noise, part "new music" of the sort where composition graduates pretend at great length and in a thousand ways to be unable to play their instruments. I know, because I wrote it down, that "Hermann Loves Pauline" seemed like it might be one of the year's best pop songs, but I know I wrote it as an abstract hope rather than because I could hum even one bar of it yet.
"Do Or Die", GUERILLA's first proper song after the playful whispering groove of "Check It Out", suggests promptly that SFA may have had some of the same doubts about their new direction that I did, or at least that they loved RADIATOR too much to try and repeat it. "Do…" is all glam-rock sheen, a repetitive and catchy cousin of "Jean Genie" and "Rebel Rebel", not that I entirely mean that as a compliment. There's a couple more songs here like it: "the Teacher" is 3-chord rock with real appluase, sequenced clapping, mechanical screaming, 1-note boogie-woogie piano, and a chorus that races straight up the scale. The pummeling "Night Vision" bases itself almost entirely around four descending hard-rock chords, four descending vocal notes to match, and a debauched giddiness to match lyrics like "'Hey you! Don't push, just wait your turn!'/ Said the bouncer to the woman with the carpet burn/ who said 'I exist in flexi-time/ you'll need a ruler cuz I'm out of line'". It's my favorite of the three, probably because its repetition reaches a spiritual purity worthy of David Lester's avant-surf guitar lines for Mecca Normal, so self-encased and unvarying that the very possibility of doing something else for one measure is driven away, silent and scampering and waving its cross. I also like how "Night Vision"s sonic background is like listening through non-Dolby headphones and a thousand miles of magma to a hobbit kitchen in Middle Earth.
Which brings me to the real overall focus of GUERRILLA: using groove (instead of dissolution) to play with cool sounds. "Turning Tide"'s insistently pretty melody could be Sarah McLachlan struggling to write something sorta cheerful, but the song pits a base 8/8 rhythm directly against a six-note keyboard pattern of broken jazz 11th chords, busy flutework serves as decoration, and the violin goes completely atonal without unsettling the nice balance. "Northern Lights" relaxes on a bed of mariachi horns, vibes, and three percussion tracks (one rock, two tropical). "Where I Lay My Phone (That's My Home)" layers hyperactive funk, chipmunk chanting, high-pitched synthetic squiggles, and lyrics delivered for no obvious reason in Jamaican patois. "Some Things Come From Nothing", with its single mantra ("some things come from nothing/ nothing seems to come from something"), is entirely a chance to blend sounds into and out of each other: slow Rhodes piano, a chirpy teakettle tune, a kickdrum/cymbal beat, acoustic guitar, bass rubberband, tunes that double or halve in speed as a new element plays them. "The Door To This House Remains Open", after a virtual still-life intro, lets its lilting melody play over choppy mechanical percussion and piano rolls. "Fire In My Heart"'s first verse is crooned a capella before more Rhodes piano, acoustic guitar, drums, a cartoonish vibration, and the sort of rock organ that registers on the Richter scale (remember Inspiral Carpets' single "Commercial Rain", anybody?) enter.
Only the finale, "Keep The Cosmic Trigger Happy", is really constructed as a song - real verses, chorus, bridge, and tunes, all in one song - and its show-tune exuberance, all piano/tuba stomp and bright-eyed horn section and circus-anthem vocals, does remind me that in general SFA strike me as disappointingly lazy. But of course, that's just by one possible standard. Every Super Furry Animals review I've read, for any of their albums - and no, that doesn't total more than three or four reviews - has been flat-out ecstatic, spreading comparisons to SGT PEPPER or ANGEL'S EGG or whatever turns the writer on. As ill-focused, bemusing, exploded-pop albums go, I suppose RADIATOR is probably among the best. As mindless, danceable weird-ass ear candy goes, GUERRILLA is clearly a triumph. And let me warn you from experience: they're right about the chewing gum.
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