To date, the Super Furry Animals have driven a blue, techno-blaring tank to gigs before selling it to Don Henley, broken the record for saying "fuck" in a charting, Steely Dan-sampling pop single, constructed a Macy's Day-sized balloon of a soda-slurping raccoon, subjected themselves to alien abduction in an ILM-created music video, recorded the highest-selling Welsh-language album ever, and remixed the Beatles for a Grammy-nominated record. To say the least, they've kept audiences on their toes with their audacity and playfulness.
It would seem that there's little left for SFA to accomplish, except for those ever-elusive multiplatinum worldwide sales. Rings Around the World aims for that and beyond. Not only do members of the Velvet Underground and the Beatles offhandedly appear on the record (completely inconspicuously), but Rings Around the World will be the first album ever to see debut release on DVD complete with 5.1 Stereo Surround Sound, videos for each song directed by Dogme directors, cartoonists, and underground radicals, and track-by-track remixes by the likes of Matmos, Kid 606, and Brave Captain. The project sounds ambitious and brilliant on paper, but it's nothing without the music to back it up. No fear, as SFA have pulled out their entire catalog of styles and whipped up their best album to date-- a bold claim to the upper echelon of rock.
On the whole, Rings Around the World infuses 1970s soul, sunshine, and sparkle to more familiar Furries territory. Philly horns and strings seep from "It's Not the End of the World," "Presidential Suite," and the first single, "Juxtaposed with U." Like their past single, "Northern Lights," "Juxtaposed" comes across more as a genre exercise-- this time favoring AM soul over tropicalia-- but flips the song with vocoder verses and a rollerskate-handclap chorus refrain of, "You've got to tolerate all those people that you hate/ I'm not in love with you but I won't hold that against you." Singer Gruff Rhys claims that Bobby Brown turned down an invitation to duet on the "let's get juxtaposed" lines, but the song remains subversively genius, nonetheless. If older singles, such as "Demons" off Radiator, modernized Bowie's Space Oddity, than "Juxtaposed" is clearly the heir to "Young Americans" and "Fame."
"Run, Christian, Run!" gallops into late-era Byrds territory, with steel guitars and modified twang, though thematically, the lyrics run the exact opposite of Sad Sweetheart's "The Christian Life." Mellow acoustic strumming and thick harmonies of lines like "you deserve to die" give way to manic breakbeats on the breath-taking "No Sympathy," perhaps the first pop song ever to fuse idyllic folk with IDM, not counting SFA's own "Mountain People," which fused idyllic folk with house.
Surprisingly, though Rings stands as the Super Furry Animals' boldest pop album yet, few songs reach into rocking territory. The heaviest moments pop up in the first third of the record, after the somnambulist stomp of the opener. "Sidewalk Serfer Girl" splices metal riffing with skittering electronics and the ever-present Huge Chorus, and the title track takes the upbeat Britpop of their debut album and layers on spectral details. Rhys growls in the speaker-blowing outro to the otherwise cheery "Receptacle for the Respectable."
The music is paisley, sun-heated, and layered, and juxtaposed to Rhys' satirical and heartfelt lyrics, the result is timeless. Just reading the song titles gives one the sense of humor and rancor that courses through the record. As mentioned before, it's impossible to deny Bowie's muse in SFA's career, despite their continued costuming in anoraks and cargo pants instead of red mullets, white scarves, spandex and suits. The chameleon act is left to the tunes. More conveniently, SFA will butt a "Let's Dance" up against a "Black Country Rock" or "Speed of Life" on the same album side, all while maintaining a rustic, inherently Welsh vibe. Princess Di, "Princess of Wales," never set foot inside the country, and karma caught up. Heed the warning and dive in.
