Heavy Petting

The Wales Invasion begins in Detroit. Super Furry Animals kicks off its first trek across the American heartland just in time for the local health department to make national headlines with news of a syphilis epidemic in the Motor City. Not a good omen unless your business is latex.

Super Furry Animals’ business is beauty. Part foamy California surf, part loamy Welsh turf, the Furries’ dense, spot-the-influence sound makes for unabashedly melodic pop that feels shatterproof. But unlike the current garage vogue, the Furries’ past isn’t some Strokes field trip to the Bowery. Instead, the group offers something almost accidentally eclectic, like a post-punk band’s amp picking up a 1972 AM radio signal.

“We’re not Lenny Kravitz,” says Guto Pryce. (If Scrabble allowed proper nouns, you’d never have another leftover tile if you memorized the members’ names — Pryce, Huw Bunford, Dafydd Ieuan, Cian Ciaran and Gruff Rhys.) From a Super Shitty Cell Phone, the Super Furry Animals’ bass player explains that the band’s shiny lo-fi sound isn’t a carefully calibrated tribute but a product of limited buying power. “We’re not purist. We’ll play whatever we can get our hands on.”

On the group’s 2001 Rings Around the World, released with what might be called underground fanfare to almost suspicious acclaim this year in the United States, it sounds like the Furries’ members got their hands on quite a bit.

“Receptacle for the Respectable” is the archetypal Furries song: Beach Boys harmonies, Up With People hand claps and “Pennylane” trumpets give way at the bridge to Bacharach flugelhorns and harmonica over a sound like distant marching feet on wet pavement — guest Paul McCartney chewing celery and carrots. Seriously. Then the song trades its acoustic guitar and Fender Rhodes for a fuzzbox and flying-saucer sound effects, and singer Rhys’ voice becomes a ridiculous, processed growl, like the Alice Cooper section of Guns N’ Roses’ “The Garden” as performed by a Muppet.

Elsewhere, the quintet puts on a Gorillaz suit to spacewalk through the instrumental “[A] Touch Sensitive” and wanders into a Spinners session on the lush “Juxtapozed With U.” Both turn out to be well within the band’s reach. Dusty analog synthesizer lines roll like tumbleweeds across the twilit, steel-guitar-inflected “Run! Christian, Run!” The band’s techno roots surface awkwardly in the jarring coda of “No Sympathy,” one of Rings‘ few tarnished moments.

“What you hear,” Pryce says, “is the end result of five people’s opinions argued out and compromised. There’s always one person who feels more strongly about a song than anyone else, but we don’t like to divide credit for anything.”

Credit for naming the band, which formed in 1995, goes to Ieuan and one of his friends. “We liked it because bands around us at the time had one-syllable names,” Pryce explains. “So we wanted to distance ourselves from that and also have an international name. It’s actually complicated translating the name into Welsh.”

A chunk of the band’s catalog, mostly unavailable in the States, is sung in Welsh, a language some of its native fans haven’t even been taught. Yet the group’s British success and growing American fanbase prove that when the music is this good, understanding the words doesn’t matter. Said the A&R man with the band’s new major-label contract. Not.

Recording English-language albums is no compromise for the Furries, though. A group that puts out a DVD of videos for every song on its would-be breakthrough American release — remixed in 5.1 Surround — the day the regular album is issued with its own bonus disc isn’t a group that concedes much. After all, the band can count among its British hits a song called “The Man Don’t Give a Fuck” that went Top 30 without any airplay.

“We were a little cheeky with the labels,” Pryce says. “But we’ve always worked with people who like us and trust us and believe in our ideas.” Convincing the Furries’ U.S. label to back Rings‘ elaborate issue was “remarkably easy,” Pryce says. “A lot of bands don’t even try. They follow the company. And with the DVD medium, there are no rules. The bonuses are there because they can be there.”

There was a time the Furries weren’t here because they couldn’t be here. Epic Records, perhaps doubtful it could break a band whose first home-country single was titled “Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychyndrobwllantysiliogogogochynygofod,” initially limited the group to East Coast American dates.

“You hear bands complaining about touring in America,” Pryce says. “They shouldn’t tour. I can never complain about touring here. Americans on the whole like American mainstream music. You get a lot of bands in Britain that come to America expecting glory. They don’t deserve it. You have to do something to earn respect.”

While the group hits Midwest clubs for the first time, its confederates are putting the finishing touches on the small studio in Cardiff where its next album will be recorded. Demos of fifty songs have been winnowed to about sixteen contenders in production for what Pryce elliptically says will be a more live-sounding album — “similar but different.” The Furries stalled sessions to make this tour but plan to finish recording soon afterward in the new space.

“We’re really basic as fuck,” Pryce says of the group’s production style. “We’re definitely not going for a vintage sound. We record this way because we literally don’t know how to record two tracks at a time. We’ve had to be more creative like that.

“We’d never plugged a mic in to record an acoustic guitar,” Pryce continues. “It’s a totally new thing. It’ll probably slow us down at first. But it’s just sixteen tracks, a lot of valve compressors, some microphones and a computer. It doesn’t cost anything to record once you’ve got a computer, but we’re aware that computers don’t let you sound as good as tape.

“It’s sort of going back to how we used to make recordings at home when we first started,” Pryce adds. “When we got in the studio, it was all coproducers, but we wanted to learn how to use the equipment. We’ve got a few friends we’ve recorded with over the years, but we don’t know what we’re doing. There’s no rules, though. We’re still doing it.”