Credit: Found On Internet

Super Furry Animals and his mob have one of the most enviable track records for a British band – insofar that they’ve never released anything that could be described as a duff release. Okay, so ‘Love Kraft’ wasn’t to many people’s tastes (including this reviewer) but you’d have to be a harsh bastard to describe it as bad. And okay, so in all probability they will never have a song so gratuitously glorious as ‘The Man Don’t Give A Fuck’. But when the new album, ‘Hey Venus!’ came into the office, there was a bubbling sense of excitement as we slapped it on the stereo.

Don’t be misled by ‘Show Your Hand’, that winsome brick of tweeness that’s been propping up afternoon radio slots for the last few weeks. It’s one of those tracks that’s impossible to hate, but similarly impossible to ever really like. It could quite easily be playing during the end credits of that kind of British RomCom Film That Your Mum Likes, but it isn’t really reflective of the whole album.

By the time this record gets halfway through, you just want to curl up in a foetal huddle and bliss out on the inventiveness on offer. Whether it’s the indie-funk (no, really) of ‘The Gift That Keeps Giving’, the Polyphonic-Spree-doing-glamrock of ‘Neo Consumer’, or the rockabilly ballad pianos married to Japanese sci-fi strings for ‘Carbon Dating’, every track on the record finds a new way to squeeze and stroke your frontal lobes till you feel almost lost amongst the multi-faced musical craftworks.

Gruff Rhys still has that almost powdery laid-back quality in his vocals, and overall this album feels like that thick warm feeling brought on by eating too much pizza and smoking too much weed. It’s not soporific, like the cup-of-cocoa output of Athlete, but sharp crafted. I hate to use a Beach Boys comparison (c/o every other review SFA have ever had ever) but with all the layers the Welshman have crafted onto each and every song on this album, it’s the only real comparison that sticks.

‘Hey Venus!’ by Super Furry Animals is out on August 27 on Rough Trade.