Description:
The fifth album from Welsh pop prodigies Super Furry Animals, Rings Around the World is their most staggeringly ambitious work to date. Featuring everything from Status Quo-style boogie-rockers to technofied drill & bass meltdowns--and even, on the DVD version, 12 specially commissioned film shorts rendered in dizzying surround sound--this is an immaculately conceived pop masterpiece with far more in common with the excitable genre-crushing of 1999's "Guerrilla" than their previous album, the very respectable but defiantly firework-less Welsh-language folk outing Mwng. One of the greatest joys is that while the ly
The fifth album from Welsh pop prodigies Super Furry Animals, Rings Around the World is their most staggeringly ambitious work to date. Featuring everything from Status Quo-style boogie-rockers to technofied drill & bass meltdowns--and even, on the DVD version, 12 specially commissioned film shorts rendered in dizzying surround sound--this is an immaculately conceived pop masterpiece with far more in common with the excitable genre-crushing of 1999's "Guerrilla" than their previous album, the very respectable but defiantly firework-less Welsh-language folk outing Mwng. One of the greatest joys is that while the lyrics are imbued throughout with a sense of dippy fun, closer inspection reveals a satisfyingly off-kilter --and frequently inspirational--intelligence. The gorgeous "Presidential Suite"--which, incidentally, features John Cale tickling the ivories--marries the classic SFA psychedelic shimmer to a weary lyric concerning the Monica Lewinsky scandal that rocked the Clinton presidency, frontman Gruff Rhys questioning it sadly like it's the most passé thing he can comprehend. Perhaps that's so: when you're playing with the sort of magic that's scattered liberally over Rings Around the World, even the salacious exploits of world leaders pale into tedium. --Louis Pattison
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Manufacturer: Epic
Release date: 23 July 2001
Number of discs: 1
EAN: 0632427900221 UPC: 632427900221
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