Every band plays music, but very few play, in the fun-having sense, as Super Furry Animals do. The infamous Glastonbury tank, electric space suits, and specially-commissioned films that have played roles in the Welsh group's live shows reflect the bizarre subject matter, tarantula-legged genre-straddling, and multilingual puns of their totally bonkers recordings. The Furries actually play so much that they have fun and games left over for side projects: keyboardist Cian Ciárán's Acid Casuals, drummer Dafydd Ieuan's the Peth, and now a second solo album from SFA frontman Gruff Rhys.
Candylion is 12 rounds of psychedelic Calvinball, new rules seemingly made up and abandoned as Rhys goes along chasing his eccentric muse. Where his solo debut, Yr Atal Genhedlaeth, was a relatively subdued, Welsh-only affair, its successor takes unseriousness as seriously as any official Furries effort, with string arrangements from High Llama Sean O'Hagan, mixing done in Rio de Janeiro with producer Mario Caldato Jr., and lilting guest vocals from Lisa Jen of Welsh folk group 9 Bach. (O'Hagan and Beastie Boys ace Caldato also lent their talents to 2005's SFA opus, Love Kraft.)
None of this hi-fi finery is enough to faze Rhys. Much like its predecessor, Candylion begins with a goofy joke: here, it comes with spoken-word synth opener "This Is Just the Beginning". The xylophone-tinged title track is an aggressively cute, Boy Least Likely To-like pop single with a simple acoustic guitar riff that runs close to Smokey Robinson's Motown classic "Tracks of My Tears", while "Gyrru Gyrru Gyrru", one of two Welsh-language songs, endlessly repeats the word for "drive" amid squelchy tropicália. ("It's a road song," Rhys has said.)
Rhys being Rhys, this eclectic collection doesn't shy away from more serious subjects, either. Lunar serenade "Beacon in the Darkness" picks up the Byrdsian pedal steel of 2003's Phantom Power; stately duet "Con Carino" waxes affectionate in broken Spanish; "Painting People Blue" goes Jackson Pollock with pastoral sorrow, over beeping bossa nova; and the percussion-pattering space-folk weeper "Lonesome Words" is to loneliness what "Fire in My Heart", from 1999 masterpiece Guerrilla, is to romantic ballads.
The shaggy-haired singer goes so far as to make dichotomies a major recurring theme: "Opposites push and pull to the fore," he sings on the title track. With double bass by Owen Evans, "Now That the Feeling Has Gone" shifts between molten sludge-rock and futuristic jazz-pop, as Rhys goes "here" and "there" with "minimum care, maximum sound." (Not that there's necessarily much difference between the two here.) And on sitar-droning "Cycle of Violence", through a cyclone of violins, Rhys suggests, "Dirty bombs and clean ones look the same when you look closely."
But Rhys reserves his biggest kicks for 13-minute finale "Skylon!", a narrative that juxtaposes an unlikely love affair with a violent airplane hijacking. "Defined myself against everything you stand for," his narrator-- a professional bomb-disposal expert-- thinks bitterly toward the starlet who takes his window seat. A monotonous "Tomorrow Never Knows" rhythm section sets a high-flying mood. Spoiler alert: Rhys and the actress eventually sell photos of their lovechild for a reputed $1 million fee and "live unhappily ever after."
