The Super Furry Animals

The Super Furry Animals are purveyors of hauntingly memorable rock music that stands as a tessellation of sounds: lilting West Coast rock, trippy psychedelia, garagey fuzz, sweet sugary pop, sunset surf harmonies, rousing guitar anthems, fist pumping protest tunes and whatever else you could imagine. Their thoroughly engaging and infinitely intriguing records are matched and surpassed by their dizzyingly dramatic live excursions and travels. Live at Chicago’s Metro, the Super Furries instantly invoked the aura of Kraftwerk with computerized, techno dance beats and extra layers of psychedelic guitar, while all around little tweets and chirps of birds echoed as the band romped on the spooky, spacey tune “A Touch Sensitive.” With barely a by-your-leave, the Super Furries launched into their interstellar pop hit “Rings Around the World”, captivating the crowd with a thumping, heartbeat rhythm and a distortion-laden feedback frenzy. The sampled sounds of a bleeping telephone seemed to be calling the psychic memory of the Beach Boys and the Kinks convening a conference call of sweet melodies, chiming falsetto harmonies, and stirring handclaps. Pure pop for now people. Quick on its heels came “Golden Retriever” — a stirring tune built on shards and sheets of fuzz guitar and waves of psychedelic sounds. Whilst the melody skipped and skated, the backdrop movie screen projected a cutesy outline drawing of a puppy as it bounded through flaxen fields so that the body of the puppy was the ever changing waving landscape. As usual, much of the delight of a live Super Furry Animals show is equal parts musical and visual, such that the achingly beautiful “Hello Sunshine” is matched by the charmingly quirky cartoonish animation of a big-eyed puffy balloon-faced sun and the surrealist winged horse with floppy man obscuring its face. Awash in colors as rich as the pinks, blues and yellows of Pete Fowler’s illustrations, “Hello Sunshine”‘s mood was one of a sparkly, dreamy, winsome ballad. Lead vocalist Gruff Rhys cooed and crooned with an ethereal rapture: “Hello sunshine come into my life/ In honesty it’s been awhile/ Since we had reason left to smile/ Hello sunshine come into my life.” One of the skills of these eccentric and eclectic Welsh rockers is their ability to couch leftist politics and impassioned social commentary in catchy pop melodies like “Liberty Belle” where a poignant and earnest lament for our post 9-11 landscape rings with a wistful rhythm. Amidst the super-animated, colorful characters, Rhys spun his narrative of “digging to hell/ drowning in oil wells/ as the ashes fly from New York City/ past the grimy clouds above New Jersey.” Catching the hooky chorus, the crowd chanted along with the back-up “woo-hoos,” creating a communal wave of dewy-eyed bliss. Similarly soft and lilting but bespeaking an angry, militant stance was “Piccolo Snare”, where sunny four part harmony vocals begged several urgent questions such as “Have you ever seen the sun, rising high to the sound of a gun?” or “Have you ever seen the sea, painted red by a bleeding army?”. Moody and brooding, the music soared with a trippy psychedelicized soul that gave way to an electrotrance and dance beat; as the lyrics became more demanding and angry, Rhys declared “brother fights brother/ wrapped up in tarnished flags/ banners and body bags/ surrender/ the power.” From the fog of the entrancing “Piccolo Snare”, the Super Furries unfurled their 21st century disco dance hit “Juxtapozed with U”. Borrowing the space-age sugary sweet symphonies of the Flaming Lips and adding a breezy tropicalia beat, SFA captivated the audience with their irresistibly catchy groove. Lost in reverie, the crowd swooned and swayed as Rhys’s vocals were a mixture of robotic vocoder warbles and lounge lizard crooning “Let’s get juxtapozed, juxtapozed, just suppose I juxtapose with you-ou-ou.” Having hypnotized the crowd with loping golden sunset rock, Beach Boys harmonies, woo-hoos, bop-bop-bobba-das, and lithe and limber beats, the Super Furries soared higher, arcing towards their zenith with a rousing take on “Receptacle for the Respectable” that began as a dueling acoustic guitar anthem built on sweet and tangy rhythms and segued into a screeching, echoing astral excursion. In the backdrop, surreal anime cartoons danced about in sort of a Fantasia on acid feel. All around the guitars, now electric, blared and blasted creating a carpet bombing aural attack. As if reading the metaphors in my mind, the Furries continued the auditory assault with screech ‘n’ preach of “Out of Control”, where Rhys assailed current foreign policy approaches and agendas while the backdrop was alive with the night scope footage of bomber raids and air strikes over the Middle East. The music was pounding, hammering and the guitars tore up the rhythm with a marching one-two crunch. Softening the sentiments but maintaining the driving frenzy came the Welsh language rocker “Calimero”. A jolt of sing-along oh-ohs on top of a Ramonesy punk rock pogo, Calimero told the tale of a Welsh cartoon character, a Mr. Chicken creature who wore a cracked shell on his head and had a longish, mopey blue face. Rhys had prefaced the song by saying “this song was written about a time when I was young and big brother was upstairs listening to Dead Kennedys records while I was downstairs watching cartoons.” Knowingly or not, the Furrries were also calling to mind other punk forefathers the Dickies who relished in the quirky, hooky punk as they scored punk versions of the themes to Gigantor and the Banana Splits. As George W. Bush’s grainy dopey visage appeared on the movie screen, a pre-recorded voice issued the declarative, “All governments are liars and murderers. All governments are liars and murderers.” If you’ve seen the Super Furries before, you knew what song was closing the night, “The Man Don’t Give a F—” — well you know the word. Don’t make me say it. Gruff will gladly howl it over and over again that indeed “You know they don’t give a f-ck about anybody else.” The pulsing beat, squealing guitars, and the dance heavy vibe made this a rallying cry, a giant middle finger to the man. A guaranteed galvanizing groove that had the whole house screaming along. Unceremoniously, the band all left the stage but for the guy playing the laptop computer who proceeded to crank out heavy duty dance beats, layering rave-up grooveshakers on the crowd, snatching and sampling riffs that looped in and out until finally all the Furries returned to the stage befitting the name Super Furry Animals as they were decked head to toe in Chewbaca style costumes. How to do you top that? Well you don’t. The crowd left palpably moved by the manic joy that had been the Super Furry Animals. These Welshmen are clearly joyous adventurers offering their fans a beguiling and bedazzling thrill ride of pure pop music. When they come to your town join the parade.