Track Listing

1. Crazy Naked Girls.
2. Mt.
3. Moped Eyes.
4. Inaugural Trams.
5. Inconvenience.
6. Cardiff In The Sun.
7. The Very Best Of Neil Diamond.
8. Helium Hearts.
9. White Socks / Flip Flops.
10. Where Do You Wanna Go?
11. Lliwiau Llachar.
12. Pric

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1239 in Music
• Released on: 2009-04-13
• Number of discs: 1
• Dimensions: .10 pounds

Amazon.co.uk Review
When your side project is off garnering Mercury Music Prize nominations (Gruff Rhys’ 80s automotive concept act Neon Neon and the album Stainless Style) your day job is probably either beyond compare or in an awful lot of trouble. Happily, eclectic Welsh indie wizards the Super Furry Animals have recorded such a mass of just-below-the-radar but well-above-the-water-mark music, in so many garden varieties, and performed so many mind-bending, eye-boggling and ear-popping live shows since the mid-90s that the stature of their albums almost comes pre-guaranteed. The majority of them will have to be dead and buried before they’re in all that much trouble. Dark Days / Light Years is, accordingly, as good as you probably expect it is. Their main peaks remain clustered in the first half of their career, but this collection of songs straddles Fuzzy Logic for grit and Rings Around The World for composition and that is a heady, smooth and effective brew by anybody’s standards, and there’s no dawdling. "Crazy Naked Girls" is as glitzy as the title suggests, like TV On The Radio gone Welsh swamp-glam, and sounds both chest-beating and tongue-in-cheek, the goofy "Inaugural Trams" is like Kraftwerk on Blackpool promenade and features, believe it or not, a German rap interlude from Franz Ferdinand guitarist Nick McCarthy, while homage to their hometown "Cardiff In The Sun" is an expanding by the second 8-minute vocoder-aided psychedelic wonder pickled in thick harmony. Dark days? Perhaps so. Here, as ever, is your ray of light. --James Berry

CD Description
The Welsh psychedelic pop legends Super Furry Animals return with 'Dark Days/Light Years', their ninth studio album. Where previous albums have seen the band experiment with extrainstrumentation, this release is full of songs based on grooves rather than ensemble composition. The band's impish sense of humour remains, though, with track titles such as 'TheVery Best Of Neil Diamond' and 'Moped Eyes' standing out. Also notable is Franz Ferdinand guitarist Nick McCarthy's guest appearance on the Kraftwerk-inspired 'Inaugural Trams', performing a German-language rap. In keeping with more recentalbums, the band also share lead vocal duties between several members.

Customer Reviews

Psychedelic and funny: a return to form
After 2007's solid but unremarkable Hey Venus!, the individual Super Furry Animals clearly agreed with the critics: it was time for a break and an adventure. Since then, drummer Dafydd Ieuan pissed about with Rhys Ifans in The Peth, and singer Gruff Rhys teamed up with producer Boom Bip made an '80s synth-pop concept album about a millionnaire car designer as Neon Neon.

As you'd expect after all that, 'Dark Days/Light Nights' (the band's ninth album) sounds like a band who've rediscovered the playful, ambitious spirit which first set them apart from their Britpop peers. First single 'Inaugural Trams' is the album's highpoint of eccentricity, setting a bizarre narrative about opening a tram system to a bubblegum electro-pop melody, then throwing in a spoken-word German cameo from Nick McCarthy of Franz Ferdinand. The end result sounds like The Smurfs covering Kraftwerk.

There are other moments of brilliance scattered throughout the album: 'The Very Best Of Neil Diamond' matches the year's best song title to one of their catchiest, most enjoyable songs in ages, while the slow-burning 'Cardiff In The Sun' and the Krautrock-esque 'Pric' are hypnotic extended jams. The album does, however, occasionally trip itself up with its laid-back feel, especially on 'Mt' and 'Inconvenience' - two forgettable pop songs with lazy, repetitive lryics. Likewise, opener 'Crazy Naked Girls' is an indulgent freak-out which outstays its welcome by several minutes.

'Dark Days/Light Years' has a tendency to become unfocused, but it also brings their psychedelic experimentalism and sense of humour back to the foreground for the first time since 2001 masterwork Rings Around the World. And that's far preferable to playing it safe for a whole album.

Light years from dark days
In a recent Pitchfork review Animal Collective declared that it must be "weird to be in a band with good musicians", referring to the fact that they basically view themselves as electronic collagists than a band in the strict (i.e., formally trained) sense. It is an interesting distinction because Super Furry Animals are first and foremost a band in the traditional mold, yet their new album finds them embracing an abandon and polychromaticism that will draw comparisons to Animal Collective's stunning `Merriweather Post Pavilion` earlier this year. Both albums share a playfulness and freedom of approach, infusing their joyful take on psychedelia with close West Coast harmonies. Where `Dark Days' differs is in its insistence on grooves, particularly those accented by Krautrock and glam rock, which add a stealthy intensity to the band's typically sun-filled universe. More an admirer than a fan of the Super Furries - my prior favourite was `Phantom Power' - `Dark Days/Light Years' was a genuine revelation for me.

The recurrent theme throughout the album is chugging motorik rhythms that set a foundation for an unhurried, Technicolor expansiveness. Opener `Crazy Naked Girls' - a mix of funky beats, Prince-style vocals and cock rocking, `this one goes to 11 guitars - vaguely recalls The Flaming Lips `The W.A.N.D'. In fact, aspects of `Dark Days/Light Years' resemble The Lips `At War With the Mystics` but with a lightness of touch palpably absent on that album. However, `Crazy Naked Girls' is arguably the most self-consciously wacky track on an album chock full of wigged-out pleasures. The beginning of `Mt' sounds a bit like folk-electronica bores Tunng, before segueing into a lolloping glam rock groove replete with a disco string section and soulful backing vocals.

Elsewhere there are nods to Bowie (from the Berlin period to Scary Monsters), particularly on the retro-futurist diptych (if I may!) `Moped Eyes' and `Inaugural Trams'. Both retain an artful credibility despite featuring all manner of antiquated synthesizing devices (moogs, vocoders, et al.) presumably hanging around the studio after Gruff's electropop project Neon Neon. `Inaugural Trams' also recalls Kraftwerk and ELO, and features a rap in German by a chap from Franz Ferdinand that (amazingly) doesn't ruin the song. In fact, many of Gruff Rhys's vocals on `Dark Days' are treated , giving them a new textural range and somehow allowing the band to play out of themselves a bit. Furthermore, the vocals are generally less prominent in the mix, making for a more democratic sound less pivoted on Gruff's presence.

`Inconvenience' is rollicking glam rock scrawled with all-manner of heady, OTT psychedelic ephemera, while `Cardiff In The Sun' is lush, hazy prog. `The Very Best of Neil Diamond' - probably the album's truely singular moment as well as its silliest song title - is an inspired amalgem of bollywood mish-mashery and electro, but is underpinned by an irresistable hook. There is still space on `Dark Days' for SFA's more archetypally catchy, harmonious pop, for instance on `Helium Hearts', `Where Do You Wanna Go?' and the breezy groove of `White Socks/Flip Flops'. The closer `Pric', begins as Krautrock but morphs into wacked-out tribal trance replete with bird calls and 808 acid patterns. As a finale it brings to mind Animal Collective's epic `Brother Sport' and another multi-couloured, unearnest psychedelic act `ooioo' (particularly the Japanese band's superb `Gold and Green`). An album for Dark Days maybe, but one of such funky, irresistable catchiness, one can't help but see light at the end of the tunnel.

10 albums since 1996; how are they still this awesome?
I've liked SFA for 13 years, and occasionally (Radiator & Guerilla) REALLY, REALLY liked them, but there's always been a sense that they're too familiar, too consistently good, to really love intensely. Well, I'm fast approaching 30 now, and SFA have suddenly revealed themselves as the metaphorical "brown-haired girl-next-door who was right for you all along", so to speak, largely thanks to Dark Days/Light Years.

I almost see DD/LY as a flipside to Hey Venus!; where that last album was essentially a collection of brief, energised pop songs that revitalised the band after the slightly tepid and mature Love Kraft, SFA's new offering showcases their longer, groovier, more psychedelic side, and does it brilliantly.

Yes, there are still moments of (glam) pop (Inconvenience, Mt) amongst the krautrock-y psychedelia, but it's definitely the wiggy guitar solos of Crazy Naked Girls, the motorik beats of Inaugural Trams, and shimmering psychedelic dynamic of Cardiff In The Sun (as beatific as Some Things Come From Nothing), and the full-on groove of Pric that characterise things for the most part.

Saying that, though, possibly the best track here is the gorgeously odd The Very Best Of Neil Diamond, which is both very pop and pretty damn avant-garde at the some time, mixing deliciously odd loops, textures, and percussive patterns into something so original that, well, you wouldn't expect it from anyone other than SFA.

I used to write about music for a couple of magazines and websites, but the last 18 months or so has seen me give that up after becoming pretty jaded with the state of things in the music scene. DD/LY has reinvigorated my love for music as well as my love for SFA themselves; as well as making me want to get their whole back-catalogue out (and I have! they're fantastic!) it's also made me want to get my headphones out in general, after far too long gathering dust. SFA OK!