Pique time
Super Furry Animal finds joy in creation on the eve of destruction. By Victoria Segal.
EVEN WITH the might of Super Furry Animals behind him, there’s always been the chance that Gruff Rhys would one day spin off into the conceptual ether like a loose balloon. Since sticking his head above the Brexit parapet with 2016’s referendum protest I Love EU, however (his “baguettes/castanets” rhyme should have been on the side of a bus), Rhys has appeared more firmly tethered, revolving along with the planet’s nightmare locked groove rather than blue-skying above it. His previous album, 2018’s Babelsberg, was a beautifully upcycled anxiety attack, dystopian clutter – drones, selfies, imminent apocalypse – scrubbed up nicely by the BBC National Orchestra Of Wales. Pang! is a different kettle, stylistically speaking, but the fish thrashing about inside remain the same: quiet panic about environmental meltdown, attraction/repulsion to social media’s giant nerve centre, unease about the ways modern life is hacking the human mind and body in a wild unregulated experiment. The title track’s supple Jim O’Rourke syncopation is a catalogue of competing demands – guilt, nostalgia, shame, Twitter – while the low-end wobble of Ôl Bys/Nodau Clust (Fingerprints/Earmarks) conflates spiritual signs and stigmata with computer codes: “Holy is your word/Holier is your password”.
Recorded in Cardiff, Pang! was produced there and in Johannesburg by South African electronic artist Muzi, who agreed to the project if all the songs were in Welsh (they are, aside from a few Zulu lines). Flaming Lips percussionist Kliph Scurlock plays drums; the sound is less country-rock, more international pop. It’s a record enabled by a world shrunk by technology, positive connections clicking together after Babelsberg’s Negative Vibes, yet defiant brass and Muzi-worked beats can only give the songs some backbone – they can’t erase the wistfulness and worry. Niwl O Anwiredd (Fog Of Lies) moves under a drum’n’brass raincloud in search of real news. Bae Bae Bae (Bay Bay Bay) is a radioactive postcard from polluted shores, dancing in toxic foam (“The fluorescent algae shout bye, bye, bye/The cancerous cells bring woe, woe, woe”).
Unlike Babelsberg’s Selfies In The Sunset, though, Pang! doesn’t just look forward to a blazing global meltdown. Beneath the modernist sheen, Rhys roots these songs in something older and wiser. The bardic raga of Taranau Mai (Thunder In May) suggests an epic hero’s personal reckoning, while the carnival brass of Annedd I’m Danedd (A Dwelling For My Teeth) sounds like a Dark Ages riddle scratched on pottery shards, (“What is an ear/But the brain’s chimney?”). Humanity has always been absurd, it suggests: it’s built-in, like obsolescence. With Pang!, Rhys chronicles it all, gently reporting from the edge of despair, but not giving in to it yet.