Super Furry Animals

“Dark Days/Light Years” is a title that captures the spirit not so much of Super Furry Animals’ new album but rather of their entire career. The Welsh five-piece—whose eclectic oeuvre has been variously described as psychedelia and power pop—have always cast light and darkness about them with equal measure—never more so than on their 2003 magnum opus, “Phantom Power,” where upbeat, frenetic melodies and beats were counterbalanced by wistful lyrics. While its sound is characteristically SFA, “Dark Days/Light Years” is a break from this tradition of point-counterpoint; it is the closest SFA have ever come to genuine, unqualified happiness.

The songs on this album revel in a joyous silliness that might seem cutesy in the hands of a less experienced band. But Super Furry Animals are grizzled veterans—this is their ninth studio album—and “Dark Days/Light Years” feels effortless, the work of a highly skilled group of musicians having fun with each other.

The prevailing happiness does not preclude SFA from ambition or from surprising the listener; after all, sudden and often bizarre sonic transitions are a tradition with this band. Take the opener, “Crazy Naked Girls,” which begins with random noise that leads into a simple, maddeningly addictive riff in a manner reminiscent of Pavement’s “Silence Kit.” With crisp, brief, repeated verses and a twin-falsetto chorus—“crazy, crazy, naked girls”—it is a perfect piece of fuzz pop that is implanted in the consciousness at the first listen, before a distortion-heavy guitar solo transposes the song into the genre of drugged-out epic. At over six minutes, “Crazy Naked Girls” is a demanding song, but the listener is easily hooked from the start.

The finest moments of this majestic album are its effervescent pop songs. Perhaps the best song on “Dark Days/Light Years” is “Inaugural Trams”, which opens with Franz Ferdinand’s Nick McCarthy counting in German. It is a sweetly silly love song as well as, yes, a tribute to trams: “Let us celebrate this monument of progress / We have reduced emissions by 75%.” Frontman Gruff Rhys sings, “I will design the town in the image of your face / Round the wrinkles of your eyes my footsteps you can trace,” his near-falsetto perfectly suiting both the playful lyrics and the gorgeous melody. The lyrics play on both environmentalism and the economy; not only does Rhys rhyme “depression” with “recession,” but he does so in a setting that renders both those words devoid of any negative power. The interspersing of Rhys’ vocals with McCarthy’s near-garbled German elevates “Inaugural Trams” to the level of comic masterpiece.

In a musical marketplace where attempts at indie rock humor that fall flat are a dime a dozen, Super Furry Animals truly stand out. They have two key strengths: an acute sense of the ridiculous and a wonderful sense of timing. Any band that can pull off the lines “I look like a loser / Coming from a gutter” and “It’s cool to find what keeps us all together” without the slightest hint of cutesy or pretension has earned the right to sing almost anything. There is the occasional moment where the silliness can go a little too far, as on “Mt,” the tale of a not so “big fucking mountain” that is “no ordinary mountain” because it is “two foot tall” and “oh so small,” but this song is the album’s only real misstep.

The vocals, in keeping with the album’s loose, relaxed feel, are a team effort in which each of SFA’s members write and sing. This cohesion comes naturally to a band that has played together for nearly two decades. Their state of comfortable maturity is also evident in their homages to their Welsh roots, both on “Cardiff in the Sun,” a tribute to the Welsh capital, and “Lliwiau Llachar,” their first song in Welsh since their 2000 decision to start singing exclusively in English. On the evidence of “Lliwiau Llachar,” a Beach Boys-esque specimen of pop harmonizing, this album would be a compelling listen even if all the lyrics were incomprehensible to the non-Welsh listener.

“Dark Days/Light Years” is as compelling a reminder as any album in 2009 that the greatest thing a band can hope to provide its audience is pure aural enjoyment. This hour’s worth of music is consistently funny and engaging, but most of all, it just sounds good. If these be Dark Days, give us more of them.