 |
It's easy to see why so little memorable music came out of the mid-90s. Everyone was so caught up in Cool Britannia and the rise of lad culture that bands started prioritising drinking and fashion above, say, writing good music (you know who you are, Menswear). So when Super Furry Animals signed to Creation Records in 1995 alongside Oasis, they must have seemed like a joke pushed too far, they wrote songs in Welsh, dressed like charity shop assistants, and some of them even had beards.
However, this collection of all 21 of their singles to date demonstrates that far from being Alan McGee's personal court jesters, they were actually a huge breath of fresh air in a rapidly stagnating musical climate. There's a relentlessly upbeat feel to everything here that makes you understand why Welsh has no word for "blue" - "Do Or Die" comes on with the energy of a teenager who's just got their first wah-wah pedal, "Play It Cool" is ludicrously sunny and when "The International Language Of Screaming's" sing along "la-la-la-la" chorus kicks in it's more than enough to persuade you that this would be the soundtrack to everybody's Summer were it not for the record label's oversight of releasing it in the middle of the Autumn.
If "Songbook" has a failing it's SFA's tendency to be a bit too over-the-top. Nearly every song has an absurd "epic" fade out that has a habit of making the sharpest of their tunes sound like Pink Floyd's wet dream, which isn't always a good thing, but such minor flaws are easily ignored when you're listening to a band that have the ability to both make you feel cheery on a cold and wet winter's day and convince you that you can sing along to a song called "Ysbeidiau Heulog".
In the year 2500, when scientists unearth a space capsule filled with 90s indie, they'll all think that SFA must have been the biggest band on the planet. And when you put this up against Oasis, it's pretty easy to see why.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment