Yahoo! Music Album Review

Released on 22/8/05
Label: Sony

The press blurb that comes with "Love Kraft" states, almost inevitably for a band's seventh album, that it's the sound of the Super Furry Animals finally growing up. Thankfully, it's nothing of the sort. If anything, their critically acclaimed but sometimes convoluted and leaden album "Rings Around The World" saw the Welsh five-piece struggling with maturity, confusing experimentation with innovation. "Love Kraft", in contrast, sees the group slowing down and settling into themselves, revelling in their customary psychedelic indulgences while knocking out a supremely relaxed perfect pop album in the process.

They clearly knew what they were going for. Songs were recorded in Catalonia and mixed in Rio with the intention of capturing a "decadent" sound and it's worked a treat. Many of the songs sound like transmissions from a sunnier, calmer yet more emotive land, as if the 1970s of the Allman Brothers and America and all those southern fried rock bands who sought enlightenment in the desert with nothing but an acoustic guitar and a ton of peyote for company, has been turned into a quietly bohemian principality. There's even a 100-piece Catalan mixed voice choir on hand to cement the limitlessly exotic feel.

The Super Furries kick-off as they mean to continue, with an immense, string-drenched, sky-kissed, gorgeously infectious, open air anthem. Sounding initially like the Radiohead of "There There", with luxurious mellotron keys replacing the percussive drive, "Zoom!" builds and builds through a host of southern fried influences until High Llama Sean O'Hagen's rising strings and the beatific Catalan choir bleed into a euphoric, cataclysmic conclusion - like it's the end of the world as we know it and we really do feel fine after all. If you'd been wondering where SFA could possibly go next before playing the album, here's the majestic, wildly ambitious answer.

Impossibly, the astonishingly high standard continues for the following twelve songs. "Atomik Lust" and "Frequency" offer yet more sublime widescreen anthems, with acid rock guitar solos and Arabic strings bolstering the open-hearted feel. "The Horn", with its blessed-out central message of "go, go with the flow", and the barrelling, hand-clapping "Back On A Roll", sound like they've been lifted from rock'n'roll touring mythology, all naïve charm and lazy, stoned optimism. "Psyclone!", meanwhile, blends junkyard dub into multicoloured pop, genres and moods melting as the song progresses.

This, you could argue, is what happens when you listen to too much music and take too many drugs - eventually all of those styles, stimuli and emotions blur into one another. The genius of the Super Furries is that they can process decades of mind-expanding music into the sweetest pop while sounding like they're just waking-up after yet another magnificently decadent weekend. "Love Kraft" isn't so much the sound of the band growing-up, then, as evolving. And if you can't see in the dark after listening to this album, then you're simply not evolving along with them.

    by Ian Watson