Yahoo! Music Album Review

Released on 08/01/07
Label: Rough Trade

Blessed with an innately soulful voice, as well as an unerring songwriting compass for matters both heartfelt and bizarre, Gruff Rhys has fronted the UK's most underrated, yet progressive-thinking band for more than a decade. Old news perhaps for the Super Furry Animals faithful, but even when singing in his native tongue, as he did on his marvellous 2005 debut, the low-key "Yr Atal Genhedlaeth", Rhys has the potential to reach a much wider audience than number 17 in the singles chart. Writing about internationalist themes - in this case everything from global terrorism to archaeology - his songs have a universal reach.

Whether this album will force the masses to sit up and listen is another matter. After the sonic overload of SFA's last opus, 2006's opulently-produced "Love Kraft", "Candylion" is a mostly pared-down affair - 11 acoustic snapshots recorded between Anglesey and Rio De Janeiro, and completed by a 15-minute sprawler. Kicking off with a spoof '70s kids TV theme ensures the mainstream hounds will be sent fully off piste, but from hereon in "Candylion" reveals itself as 2007's first truly indispensable album.

Following the cutesy, sweet-natured title track, the first sign of greatness arrives with track three, "The Court Of King Arthur", which, despite the worryingly prog-like title, owns a chorus that fizzes like a psychedelic roman candle. Even better are "Lonesome Words" - a rough appropriation of Leonard Cohen's "Who By The Fire" with added vocal wailing courtesy of Lisa Jen and some gorgeous string patterns from ex-High Llama Sean O'Hagan - "Now That The Feeling Has Gone", possibly the best ballad George Harrison never wrote, and the "Wicker Man"-style pagan folk that underpins "Cycle Of Violence". "Dirty bombs and clean ones look the same when you look closely", intones Gruff sagely.

The more eccentric aspects of his mind are explored with "Con Carino", a rudimentary stab at Spanish that comes up smelling all Tropicalia, and the obligatory Welsh language numbers "Ffrwydriad Yn Y Ffurfafen" and "Gyrru Gyruu Gyruu". The latter, which features variations on the word "drive" against an ever-spiralling guitar line, is apparently it's maker's stab at the world's first 'road song'. However, concentration levels are suddenly upped for the finale of "Skylon!".

Here we find Rhys writing from the perspective of a bomb disposal expert on a hijacked plane in a shaggy dog polemic about "ticking beer cans", a Hollywood lovechild and '70s paranoia. Shuffling on for a relentlessly ambitious 15-minutes, it's the sort of moment that you just don't get on Razorlight albums, and rounds off what is indisputably one of the best projects Gruff Rhys has ever been involved with. "Candylion" is a triumph of art over artifice. This beast may not roar, but it's far from toothless.

    by Adam Webb