Super Furry Animals
Phantom Power

THE REVIEW

What does it mean to be mature? Is it a desirable condition?
What is a mature album?
These are some of the questions I find myself facing while listening to this latest effort by SFA.

Inevitably, there comes a time in every band's life when there's a need to make a leap in quality, to expand their audience, to make a "mature" album. It's part of the normal growth process.
The same group members are no longer in their twenties, so their perspectives, needs, and ambitions change.

The question remains whether pop/rock music is not a young person's affair, doesn't it, in fact, suppose a certain dose of recklessness, a love for risk, even incompetence, in short, immaturity?
Could it not, therefore, be a contradiction in terms the very idea of a mature pop album?

In the case of a group like SFA, the question is all the more pertinent because their best qualities - unpredictability, madness, inventiveness - require that initial enthusiasm that inevitably diminishes over time in favor of technical skill and compositional solidity.

Thus, "Phantom Power" marries a more cohesive, structured, "classic" type of writing and sees a general predominance of the "ballad" form over faster numbers (one of the few being the excellent single "Golden Retriever").
In general, there's a sense of recovering sixties vocal forms ("Piccolo Snare", "Hello Sunshine", “Sex, War And Robots") with good results.
In the second part of the album, the quality of songwriting drops with the banal "Bleed Forever" and "Out Of Control" only to rise again to the excellent closing track "Slow Life".

A well-crafted, well-played, lush work: very sunny in sound, very grounded in reality in the lyrics with various references to the winds of war that have swept through the West in recent years ("Piccolo Snare", "Out Of Control", "Slow Life", the same phantom power alludes to the hidden power that controls individual destinies).

In short, SFA is maturing. It's not necessarily a bad thing. There are enough jewels to look forward to a bright future.