Furries’ seventh album not politics as usual
Super Furry Animals’ last two albums, Rings Around the World and Phantom Power, were freighted with heavy-handed social commentary at odds with the band’s ambitious, cartoonish music. Their latest, however, jettisons such overt political subject matter in favor of a vaguer, more pervasive sense of unease and unrest. It’s a minor change, but it seems to free the band considerably on Love Kraft, which is perhaps its best since 1999’s space-trucker epic Guerilla.
Opener “Zoom” makes a chorus of the Def Leppard-worthy rock pun “Kiss me with apoca-lips” before launching into an immense choral coda. “Ohio Heat” carries a folksy drift and harmonies that namecheck CSN&Y, while the bouncing beat of “The Horn” recalls Welsh contemporaries Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci. More than any of its predecessors, Love Kraft is awash in cinematic strings, especially the seductive “Walk You Home” and closing track “Cabin Fever.” The Furries are super once more.