Travelogue Thursday: Wales
This week, our globetrotting adventures actually manage to leave the North American continent and take us to the land of Catherine Zeta-Jones and really long words without vowels in them. Aside from these notables, Wales also has a vibrant music scene uniquely its own. At its centerpiece are the Super Furry Animals, a band unlike anything you’ve ever seen or heard.
SFA was actually the fir
st concert I attended in my career as an indie rock snob. I was invited by my friend Alain, and as I’d only heard their music now and again while driving in his car, I didn’t know quite what to expect. In retrospect, I can describe it as being something like a combination of the tripped out antics of the Flaming Lips combined with the UK sensibilities of a Belle and Sebastian (only amped up tenfold). Lacking such musical vocabulary at the time however, I could only describe it as awesome. Giant video screens with surreal cartoons, disorienting techno loops, and then the grand finale, in which the entire band came out dressed in Yeti suits…. simply astounding. I was hooked.
Super Furry Animals are one of those bands where I really and truly enjoy their whole catalog (including the stuff recorded in Welsh… now there’s a trip for you), so its incredibly hard to choose a song amongst the epic ballads about the perils of chewing gum (“Chewing Chewing Gum”) and straight up rockers about Einstein’s parents (“Herman loves Pauline”, which features the brilliant lyrics “they called him MC-squared, cause he raps like no other/an asthma sufferer, like Ernesto Guevara”), not to mention “The Man Don’t Give a Fuck,” which features the f-bomb being dropped over 50 times in four minutes.
However, as a SFA primer, you probably can’t do too much better than “Rings Around the World.” The titular track off of arguably their most ambitious and wide-ranging album, the song sounds something like a beach boys ditty recorded by space aliens. Also, it opens with one of the best metaphors for love ever—“you expose the film in me”. So yeah, an all around winner:
Super Furry Animals- (Drawing) Rings Around The World
SFA was actually the fir
st concert I attended in my career as an indie rock snob. I was invited by my friend Alain, and as I’d only heard their music now and again while driving in his car, I didn’t know quite what to expect. In retrospect, I can describe it as being something like a combination of the tripped out antics of the Flaming Lips combined with the UK sensibilities of a Belle and Sebastian (only amped up tenfold). Lacking such musical vocabulary at the time however, I could only describe it as awesome. Giant video screens with surreal cartoons, disorienting techno loops, and then the grand finale, in which the entire band came out dressed in Yeti suits…. simply astounding. I was hooked.Super Furry Animals are one of those bands where I really and truly enjoy their whole catalog (including the stuff recorded in Welsh… now there’s a trip for you), so its incredibly hard to choose a song amongst the epic ballads about the perils of chewing gum (“Chewing Chewing Gum”) and straight up rockers about Einstein’s parents (“Herman loves Pauline”, which features the brilliant lyrics “they called him MC-squared, cause he raps like no other/an asthma sufferer, like Ernesto Guevara”), not to mention “The Man Don’t Give a Fuck,” which features the f-bomb being dropped over 50 times in four minutes.
However, as a SFA primer, you probably can’t do too much better than “Rings Around the World.” The titular track off of arguably their most ambitious and wide-ranging album, the song sounds something like a beach boys ditty recorded by space aliens. Also, it opens with one of the best metaphors for love ever—“you expose the film in me”. So yeah, an all around winner:
Super Furry Animals- (Drawing) Rings Around The World
posted by Jeff Lakin at 10:26 AM
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