Super Furry Animals are a pop consortium in the vein of the Beatles in that they'll try any musical style and use any idea (the comparison should end there, however). There's not a single thing they won't do, and on this album you've got an acoustic pop track that turns into a death metal song ("Receptacle for the Respectable") a countryish ballad that becomes an Aphex Twin-ish IDM track and several songs that sound like Broadway showstoppers ("Shoot Doris Day" and "It's Not The End of the World?"). It's impossible to describe exactly what a Super Furry Animals album
sounds like because that changes track-to-track and even minute-to-minute, so all you can do is rate how well the songs work. I don't feel like this one is quite as successful as
Radiator (which was their best collection of songs) or even
Guerrilla (which was their best attempt at messing with genres) but it does have a better sense of sequencing: "Run, Christian Run!" has an honest-to-god epic guitar solo to close things out, and "Alternate Route to Vulcan Street" is a great, shimmery opener. The problem is that here the "wacky" effects occasionally crowd out the songs, which are weaker than those in the band's past, and too much time is wasted on inexplicable sound effects and noise that create no atmosphere and mostly serve as lip service to the band's eccentricity and to help bolster their "weird" credentials. These moments don't work, but the album mostly does and it's the rare pop record that is as ambitious in its sound as it is in its melody and songwriting.
MY RATING:
8.1
Super Furry Animals - "Receptacle for the Respectable"
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