Super Furry Animals - Guerrilla

8.0 - Wales - 1999

Kind of a transitional album from the Welsh wizards, Guerrilla sees the quintet employ a much more electronic sound to their ebullient psychedelic pop. Compared to Radiator and Fuzzy Logic, this record seems to have less "songs" and instead seems to be largely made-up of studio experimentation. When it first came out, Guerrilla was initially a bit of a disappointment to someone expecting another collection of "Demons" or "Play It Cool". Nearly twenty years on, however, this record is revealed to be quite ahead of its time: a very prescient, if fractured, vision of pop to come. Indeed, listening to this now, I was struck by how much contemporary top 40 music is mindlessly derivative of the effortless genius on display here.

Indeed, when reappraising the Britpop scene of the 1990s, it's clear that the Super Furry Animals have emerged as having the most important legacy of any of those groups (Radiohead and Mogwai didn't really fit into the Britpop scene and The Beta Band just never managed to fully seize the zeitgeist). Sure, Oasis were massively popular, and that popularity certainly drove the Britpop movement (particularly outside of Britain), but could anyone claim to be actually influenced by the Gallaghers' staid brand of trad-rock? Despite the number of units shifted, did Definitely Maybe or (What's The Story) Morning Glory in any way change the way music was made or apprehended? Really, Oasis' sole innovation was adding some fuzz to Beatlesy song structures. The SFAs on the other created an incredibly imaginative and thoroughly unique sound that updated classic 60s pop (the Beach Boys especially) with the energy of punk and the inventiveness of techno. Perhaps the only group that did anything comparable was the Stone Roses, who launched the Britpop genre by marrying classical guitar-based indie-rock with the energy and rhythms of ecstatic dance culture. But whereas that group burned themselves out after one album, the SFAs managed to string together a nine-album run of sheer excellence. In many respects, Guerrilla, while perhaps not their best work, may well be the lynchpin in their catalogue, as it embodies the transition from the masterful pop of their first two albums to the more widescreen sound of their later work.

Anyway, while the second and third tracks on Guerrilla, "Do Or Die" and "The Turning Tide", respectively embody the Super Furry tropes of fast-paced melodic pop-rocker and sumptuous psych ballad, things quickly get weird with the calypso-tinged, steel-drum-led lead single "Northern Lites", and the album never looks back. Tracks like "Wherever I Lay My Phone (That's My Home)" and "The Door To This House Remains Open" sound like half-baked studio noodling that got out of hand, but that's not at all a bad thing: For a band as boundlessly imaginative as the Super Furry Animals, it's a treat to hear them just mucking around with various ideas and textures. For one, you end up with a track as utterly gorgeous as the album's centrepiece highlight "Some Things Come From Nothing" in which a half-assed looped drum part and an out-of-tune acoustic guitar team up with a simple Rhodes riff and a lovely little synth line to create something truly magical. Indeed, arguably out of nothing.

And sure, "Chewing Chewing Gum" and "The Teacher" come across as rather corny jokes, but the whole album is so shot through with effusive joy that they simply add to the fun. The group very deliberately wanted to create an upbeat pop album, so while loads of tracks were recorded for the album, such throwaway pieces were included at the expense of more downbeat and perhaps "better" tracks like the eventual b-sides "The Matter Of Time" and "This, That And The Other". Sadly, however, the group was underwhelmed by the lackluster commercial reception and so for their next album, they deliberately created a lo-fi, "difficult" album: the Welsh-language Mwng, perhaps their masterpiece...