Super Furry Animals - Fuzzy Logic

7.5 - Wales - 1996

So I guess we're going through all the Super Furries albums. In my review of Pink Floy-- sorry, The Pink Floyd's Piper At The Gates Of Dawn, I mentioned how that album is lionized as a gem of psychedelic pop buoyed by Syd Barrett's quirky, whimsical songcraft. Outside of a few ringer tracks, though, I do think that particular metanarrative is rather overblown (fueled largely by the romantic connotations of Barrett's mythic, Icarus-like career trajectory). Fuzzy Logic, the debut long player from the Cymric quintet, the Super Furry Animals, however, to these ears sounds exactly like the album that Piper is held to be, albeit shot through a post-punk lens (fitting, as most of the promulgators of the Barrett-era-Floyd-is-the-best-Floyd myth tend to see the band's career through a post-punk revisionism that castigates the group's later work and ignores their crucial, most interesting middle period). Like the Piper of myth, Fuzzy Logic is a collection of psychedelic pop songs with interesting, unusual arrangements, spacey instrumentation centred around effects-laden guitars and an assortment of keyboards, and playful lyrics that are full of wit, whimsy, and wonder. A couple of key differences, though: the more noisey avant-gardeism of Piper is replaced here by an upbeat punkiness, and, of course, the Super Furries have one major weapon in their arsenal that the Floyd never really had: those incredible vocal harmonies.

On a track-by-track basis, the singles from this album are all killer. Opener "God! Show Me Magic" is the Platonic ideal of the pop-punk ditty. The hedonistic "Something 4 The Weekend" takes the quintessentially British "Digsy's Diner" rhythm and marries it with a laid-back, intensely melodic chorus.  The string-led "If You Don't Want Me To Destroy You" is the first lush Super Furry ballad (and features a great chorus line: "Gravity / you just hold me down / so quietly"). "Hometown Unicorn" might be the best thing here, though. A wonderfully wacked tale of alien abduction set to a great psychedelic chord sequence and culminating in a rousing sing-along chorus (with those nice stacked harmonies). Some nice finds in the deep cut department, too. "Fuzzy Birds" is a charming tale of guitarist [Huw] Bunf[ord]'s attempts to use his hamster Stavros to generate electricity, and the underrated "Mario Man" is a thoroughly pleasant exercise in squelchy lite funk. Some of the rockers don't fare quite as well: "Hanging With Howard Marks" doesn't quite live up to its namesake and "Frisbee" and "Bad Behaviour" are rather forgettable (the latter redeems itself though once it degenerates into squalls of wonderful noise). Also, "Long Gone" inaugurates the somewhat unfortune tradition of the SFAs bogging down the second side of their albums with rather dull slow songs (see Rings Around The World for the worst instance of this phenomenon). Its inclusion here is especially unfortunate given that the incredible "Arnofio / Glô In The Dark" was relegated to a b-side. Still, for a formative debut, Fuzzy Logic is most impressive, and compared to the stolid work of their contemporaries (think Oasis' staid trad-rock or Radiohead's angst wank), the Super Furries were, and remain, a breath of zany fresh air (albeit somewhat tinged with the aroma of pot). And this was just the beginning...