The Super Furry Animals Dark Days and Light Years

Since 2007's Hey Venus Super Furry Animals have been keeping busy with their various side projects including Daf and Guto's acclaimed work as part of The Peth with Rhys Ifans, Cian's Acid Casuals and of course Gruff's Mercury nominated work with Neon Neon. Finally finding time to get back together, Super Furry Animals managed to stay in a room just long enough to record a new record which would come to be known as Dark Days / Light Years.

Dark Days / Light Years is an interesting proposition because it's an all encompassing sort of record. By that I mean, Super Furry Animals have created an album that's a fantastic combination of the best bits from their entire catalog. In other words, Dark Days / Light Years is a progressive rock album mixed together with a stellar pop sensibility, a sense of sarcasm, folk rock, and that strangeness that makes Super Furry Animals the crazy Welshmen they are. That might seem like to much too handle, but truth be told it's not.

Gruff and company write pop songs as if their life depended on them and drop them on unsuspecting listeners like bombs. From the epic six minute opener, "Crazy Naked Girls," to the warped out strings of, "Mt," it doesn't really matter how SFA go about writing songs, they always stumble upon melodies and choruses that you'll never forget. In fact, within the first ten minutes of Dark Days / Light Yearswill have roped you in and have you mesmerized by the sheer quirkyness of the bands songcraft. No sound or idea is to bizarre for these boys and they embrace the very concept of making something strange artfully brilliant; they've been doing this for 15 or so years, so thy've gotten kind of good at it and it shows.

Dark Days / Light Years is a fantastically twisted and outlandish blast of pop music. It's brilliance resides in it's ability to take something like progressive rock and mould it into something that's completely adaptable like pop music. Dark Days / Light Years is a tribute to not only their oddball approach to music but their longevity and ability to make a career of it. Highly recommended.