In the Super Furry Animals' world, each note, each word contains multitudes of meanings. So frontman Gruff Rhys's pre-SFA band name Ffa Coffi Pawb can mean either "Everybody's Coffee Beans" or "Fuck Off, Everybody." So 2003's "Venus & Serena" refers to the tennis sisters and/or two pet turtles beloved of a boy raised by wolves (sure, why not?). The recordings are pop, psychedelic, IDM, punk, funk, folk, soul, classical-- often all at once. "Citizens Band", a hidden track from the band's 1999 album Guerrilla required a liner-note glossary to decode its playful lyrics, as Rhys sang: "So many ways to communicate what you want to say."
Love Kraft, then, the Welsh quintet's seventh album in 12 years, may be an homage to the bands Love and Kraftwerk. It may signal the band's love for its craft, or acknowledge the eternal sense/sensibility, passion/prose, Speakerboxx/The Love Below dichotomy. Is it an expression of affinity for "master of the macabre" H.P. Lovecraft, whose novels sometimes took place in an SFA-OK "Dreamlands" setting and are familiar to Re-Animator fans? If you believe Rhys' press clippings, it's either a sex shop in Cardiff, Wales, or a "hovering vehicle"-- a fitting replacement for the band's Radiator-era "peace tank." Heck, maybe Rhys just really digs cheese.
Whatever its etymology, Love Kraft is a utopian epic, a sweeping musical argument for love in the time of Fallujah. In that sense, it's vintage SFA, with even its departures underscoring the band's long-established strengths. The leftist politics are less overt, but just as potent; the compositions more focused, but still mad as a Lewis Carroll hatter; the pop more rockin', yet probably more accessible to noobs. The splash that begins the album is at once a baptism and an immersion, and the band doesn't come up for air until High Llama Sean O'Hagan's final flitting string arrangement.
Politically, fury has given way to fantasy. Gone are direct polemics like antiwar parable "The Piccolo Snare" or Bush-burner "Out of Control", both from 2003's Phantom Power. With the world "slipping away"-- "Kiss me with apocalypse," Rhys mourns on opener "Zoom!"-- the Furries throw up their hands and invent a new one, full of dinosaurs, chickens, horsenappings, unwanted pregnancies, and, yes, love. The intergalactic Prince workout of lead single "Lazer Beam" proposes "no more romantic comedies" (take notes, Dems!) and a weapon to wash away evil-- as practical, when you think about it, as convincing certain voters they were misled into a downward-spiraling war. On "Frequency", Rhys' target is clear ("You say history will be your judge/ But the jury's whipped, gagged, and drugged"), but a sumptuous "Turning Tide"-style hook dilutes the venom. The songs are at once lovely and full of impotent dread; if you can't beat 'em, they seem to decide, beautify.
For the first time, four of the band's five members sing and contribute songs-- including keyboardist Cian Ciárán, ostensibly the force behind the band's past trackier, IDM-influenced efforts-- and together they grasp the narrative arcs that sometimes have eluded Rhys. The tripartite "Cloudberries", with its "Took a circle of friends to the village square/ Oh, love triangles" and samba-like midsection, ranks among the band's finest. Ciárán's "Walk You Home" starts as shy, string-laden Avalanches lounge before swelling into a delicate payoff. Drummer Dafydd Ieuan's "Atomik Lust" leads languid "Feel Flows" keyboards unwittingly into a radioactive wall of guitars; "I'd love to see the ending someday of Citizen Kane," Ieuan sighs. Guitarist Huw "Bunf" Bunford's Wings-esque road tune "Back on a Roll" is the lone disappointment.
"Lazer Beam" aside, the guitar-heavy Love Kraft may be the Furries' most straightforward "rock" album. Even as "Psyclone!" riffs on space invaders and tyrannosaurs, it boasts the most enormous na-na-na-na chorus this year-- Beck's "E-Pro" swathed in Moroccan samples and brazen strings. "Ohio Heat" steps from Phantom Power's Byrdsian twang to an America-esque trot, with harmonies and acoustic guitars spooning sugar onto lyrics involving a fictitious Welsh emigrant's 19th-century Midwestern suicide. Bunf's "The Horn" must be among the catchiest songs ever to prominently feature the dulcimer.
Even beyond the album title, everything Super Furry means more than it seems. "Atomik Lust" is apparently about Ieuan's fear of flying as well as "if-it's-not-love-then-it's-the-bomb" apocalyptic romance-- complete with "turbulence" sound effects. Jurassic, galactic goof "Psyclone!" can also be about Creationism, re-branded these days as "intelligent design." "Zoom!" was originally performed in a 2001 Peel session with inscrutable nonsense lyrics instead of its current ashen-faced wordplay.
On "Walk You Home", Ciárán sings, "The future ain't what it used to be." The line has been attributed to Yogi Berra, French symbolist poet Paul Valery, and Arthur C. Clarke. At its essence, Love Kraft is an assertion that the future-- and the present-- don't need to be that way at all; indeed, they can be however we imagine them. On album-closing "Cabin Fever", a piano comedown worthy of Dennis Wilson's overlooked Pacific Ocean Blue, Ciárán gets the last word, so refreshed, so clean: "The future now is wide open and clear." Anything's possible.
