Super Furry Animals
Hey Venus!

The Super Furry Animals (literally "super furry animals") are among the most unjustly underrated bands (by the general public) in the entire European music scene. Led by the eccentric Gruff Rhys (fresh from his solo debut with the good "Candylion"), they release this new full-length titled "Hey Venus!".

Preceded by the Beach Boys-oriented pop of the delightful single "Show Your Hand" and opened by the ironic and playful 43 seconds of pop 'n roll in "The Gateway Song", the new work maintains the Welsh band's quality standard at a fairly high level. In terms of sound, the album is a very pleasant return to the purely pop style of the excellent "Fuzzy Logic" (now dated 1996).

Gruff's voice is as beautiful and unique as usual, and even in tracks where the guitars become moderately more acidic - see the excellent "Run-Away" - the melodies are spot-on and meticulously crafted. The brevity (thirty-six minutes) and the compactness of the work definitely make it more accessible compared to the latest works of the Welsh combo. Moving beyond the first two tracks, the themes become more intimate but not unpleasant, as in the delightful falsetto of "The Gift That Keeps Giving" (a track that could even resurrect the seasoned Simply Red), then dancing on the "blurred" rhythms of "Neo Consumer" and veering towards the guitar-eighties sounds of "Baby Hates My Eightball" and "Into The Night" (falsetto aplenty here too). Particular mention definitely goes to the retro-pop of "Carbon Dating", where Gruff shows he appreciated the lesson imparted by Albarn in the last "The Good, The Bad And The Queen" (listen to "80's Life") and the Coxonian chant "Suckers!", placed in sequence. The wind instruments of the nonchalant "Battersea Odyssey" and the subdued "Let The Wolves Howl At The Moon" bring down the curtain on the work.

It must be said that this excellent band has kept intact the taste of chiseling wide-reaching pop melodies, and above all manages to make various influences coexist and direct them into a single, pleasant and homogeneous flow, as very few, very few other groups have the fortune to know how to do. They are well-coordinated, technically excellent, and certainly not new to the scene (this is their eighth studio album), so big compliments. Very significant words from Gruff: "Many of the tracks on 'Hey Venus' have as their central theme the adventures of a woman named Venus who moves from a small town to a big city. Some songs follow this pattern more closely than others, considering the first idea was to develop a concept, but then we decided to choose the tracks based on merit, and songs deemed valid but disconnected from the main theme were included in the album".

For those who appreciate good pop, the kind that is not predictable and plastified. And bravo to the little animals.