A cell phone bleeped during Gruff Rhys' recent one-off show in New York City. Nothing fancy: just three pre-polyphonic chirps, like a car alarm arming. Rhys, rather than castigate the hapless technology victim, merely quipped: "That's a good song!"
Such is the aesthetic of the Super Furry Animals' self-deprecating chief prankster, a grinning Wonka for absurdist pop candy and whiz-bang noise-making. The title track to Yr Atal Genhedlaeth (an untranslatable p-p-pun that means "The Stuttering Generation") is just nine seconds that, y'know, stutter as if to teach iPod Nation how scratched CDs used to sound. From there follow 10 songs about the Euro, rival MCs who drown their Corn Flakes in beer, and a dying lover endearingly nicknamed "Pwdin Wy", which means "Egg Pudding".
All that, and it's less psychedelic than your average Super Furries' album, emphasizing songcraft and melody, and framed by Rhys' upside-down left-handed Velcro-enhanced acoustic guitar and thriftstore Yamaha beats. De facto opener "Gwyn Mi Wn" eschews even the guitar, opting for airy overlapped vocals atop clanging cymbal 'n' drum samples. "Ni Yw Y Byd" flips through keys like your humble rock scribbler through Ffa Coffi Pawb 12-inches he can't pay for, yet remains sing-songy enough for its title (trans., "We Are the World"). Those demanding still-greater quirkiness are directed to wistful "Ambell Waith", which rocks both car-noise synths and village-green trumpets.
Then there's the straightforward power-pop of "Pwdin Wy 1", "Epynt", and "Y Gwybodusion", which guarantee uncomprehending elevator-ride sing-a-longs. I mentioned this is all in Welsh, right? The language barrier is easy to forget, despite Rhys's occasionally harsh Brithonic consonants, because much like the Super Furry Animals' 2000 Welsh-language excursion, Mwng, this album strings together so much surface-level pop magnificence-- what Nietzsche called " the whole Olympus of appearance"-- that its lyrics are, to English-speaking listeners, beside the point. Thus Rhys can cover a Celine Dion-worthy Welsh power ballad, "Chwarae'n Troi'n Chwerw" and we can raise our lighters none the wiser.
All Yr Atal Genhedlaeth lacks is the unifying ambition of the great SFA records. That's understandable, given this album's casual nature. But the solo disc's off-the-cuff jollity befits Rhys's concert opener/closer: a pre-programmed elevator-synth rendition of "Just the Way You Are".
