I wish they'd re-issue their entire catalog on vinyl. I have Phantom Power, Love Kraft (and the SACD) Hey Venus, and Dark Days/Light Years on vinyl, but my favorite LPs by them are pretty difficult to find at decent prices. I'll certainly pick up Mwng, which is their only album I don't own.
Interestingly for me, they are coming to the town where I live, and headlining a new festival: http://www.kentonline.co.uk/tunbridge-wells/news/top-names-for-new-music-34069/
Got it today; listening now. I would say the sound is acceptable but nothing spectacular. A bit flat in places. On the upside, the live performances, especially the Peel session, are worth the price of admission. The pressing quality is fairly good. All 3 LPs are flat & centered, only a brief moment of what sounds like nofill.
From NME: http://www.nme.com/reviews/super-furry-animals/16065 For a band with such a forward-thinking outlook as Super Furry Animals, it seemed initially surprising that the main reason behind their first tour in six years is to mark a couple of anniversaries. However, the dates – which begin officially tonight inside a sweaty university hall in the city the Furries regard as home – were booked to plug the 15th anniversary reissue of their Welsh language album ‘Mwng’, as well as marking 20 years since their first EP. It’s an appropriate time to remind people of the synapse-shredding brilliance of one of the UK's best ever groups – who formed in 1993 and went on hiatus between 2010-2014 – especially as there remains a nagging feeling that their excellence was taken somewhat for granted. As singer Gruff Rhys told NME recently "it's nice to remind people what we've done" – namely recording a peerless back catalogue and developing a reputation for performing astonishing gigs that in the past have featured headbanging yetis, dancing monsters, 40ft inflatable bears and making an entrance on a golf buggy. They inspire utter devotion from their followers, whose giddy excitement can be sensed the minute you walk in. There is frenzied chatter about what will they play, and in the end so strong is their back catalogue that tonight's 25-song set leaves out some of their biggest hit singles without anybody being bothered in the slightest. Many fans are here with their kids, most of whom have never witnessed the Furries’ magical mayhem. Greeted by a deafening roar, the band are dressed like mad scientists in white boiler suits. A dizzying blur of frantic psych pop (a demented 'Do Or Die', the naughty glam of 'Bad Behaviour') dominates the early part of the set. The partisan crowd show they share their idols' commendable attention to detail by singing along heartily to intricate harmonies, crunchy guitar riffs and even the brass parts, which pleasingly embellish the dreamy 'Demons' and 'Northern Lites'’ crazy calypso. This back-to-back sequence kicks off a laid-back mid-section dominated by a batch of songs off 'Mwng'. In an act of typical perversity, SFA didn't tour that record in their native country at the time, so bar the odd occasion (such as at their Bethesda show in 2003), the Welsh public hadn't had much of a chance to hear this material played live. In particular the keening, strained beauty of 'Gwreiddiau Dwfn/Mawrth Oer Ar Y Blaned Neifon' is enormously affecting, a reminder that, for all the inventiveness behind the band's approach to live performance, it's the more simple moments that are arguably the most rewarding. Having said that, no one's complaining about the touches that embellish the rest of an unforgettable evening – these boys don't skimp on the lights and lasers. When perennial closer – a frenzied, monumental 'The Man Don't Give A ****' – sees the welcome reappearance of the aforementioned monsters and yetis, we’re reminded just how much we've missed them all. See them this summer, because SFA's past still sounds like the future.
I don't know if this is common knowledge (discogs, for one seems to have missed it), but the 2CD reissue of Mwng has much more to offer than the announced content, as a demo version of the entire album (plus an extra snatch of a messed-up 'Drygioni') is included as a hidden track on the first disc. 'Track 11' is more than half an hour of unreleased SFA goodness. This is surely the most bountiful 'hidden track' I've ever come across.
Also, FYI, the furries are playing at least one gig in the US, headlining the 4Knots Festival in NYC on July 11. Would that I could go.
That extra bit should be a vocoder track for "Ysbeidiau Heulog". My roommate chose all the bonus material (except for the "Mwng Bach" tracks) and edited the live performances so they sounded like they were played in sequence. As far as I know, he still hasn't gotten copies from Domino yet, but I have a CD-R he burned me of the master. He's currently going through their vaults and selecting things for further potential reissues. I've heard bits and bobs and there's some pretty great stuff in there.
How AWESOME!! If you can get him to take pix of what the SFA 'vaults' look like..... tell him there are fans HERE... and , WE WANNA SEE!!! and, keep us posted!
The album itself has not been remastered as: a)the band were happy with how it sounded, b)several tracks on the album were stitched together from multiple mixes and they didn't want to figure out what was what and reconstruct it (and possibly get something wrong).
First I've heard about even the possibility of new material! http://www.villagevoice.com/music/v...per-furry-animals-descend-on-new-york-7330301 The year 2015 marks, among other things, the twentieth anniversary of the Super Furry Animals' first proper release and debut as a live act. It also represents, at maybe just a bit of a stretch, twenty-fiveyears since their very earliest embryonic stirrings, in Wales, as a band. But none of those is the milestone they've chosen to commemorate this year. Instead the Super Furries — in characteristic fashion, which is to say lovably askew — have elected to return to the road in honor of Mwng, the stripped-down 2000 outlier on which they sang exclusively in Welsh. (The title is pronounced somewhere between "moong" and "mung.") The album, long out of print, has just been reissued by Domino. The handful of dates behind it, including the Voice's own 4Knots (July 11), are their first outings as a unit since 2009. So: Why not go with the silver jubilee, as opposed to a mile marker for which there is no handy nomenclature? "The stars were just in alignment," insists Cian Ciarán ("KEY-an Kieran"), multi-instrumentalist and something of the group factotum. "We didn't plan any of it. "We didn't plan last year to come back and do a reissue. We spoke to Domino maybe two or three years ago about reissuing, and a guy called Ric Rawlins wrote the biography [Rise of the Super Furry Animals], which came out in February, and then we got offered some shows and it was like those three things all came together around the same time. It wasn't like we put a marker down and decided, 'We're gonna do it.' It kinda made sense. It wasn't contrived. There was no big marketing ploy behind it. It happened to be the fifteen-year — well, every year is an anniversary of some sort, so." Indeed, contrived seems to be a dirty word in the Super Furry lexicon, emerging as it does more than once in conversation with Ciarán to denote the antithesis, basically, of the group's ethos. Even in matters as trivially prescriptive as band roles — here Ciarán will cop to certain members having certain especial métiers, certain primary functions onstage, but apart from that paints a portrait of Super Furry World as rather a democratic and label-less place. Pressed on the accuracy of early-career depictions of him as the group's secret-weapon electronics guru/sonic architect — or as he puts it, "a synth wizard or some ****" — Ciarán bristles. "I'm not very comfortable with that," he says. The five members, he explains, are all equally hands-on in the studio. "Everyone shares. Everyone plays a bit of keyboards. Everyone dabbles....Maybe I had a bit more grasp of computers and sequencers and synths and that. [But] that's what's good about being in a band, you know — if you gave each member the same song and locked them away in the studio on their own, you'd get five different versions of that same song." Those five members, incidentally, are: Gruff Rhys (lead vocals/guitar, he of the dark fluffy hair and beady eyes), Huw Bunford (guitar/vocals; scraggy, vaguely Scandinavian), Guto Pryce (bass; the most workaday-looking), Dafydd Ieuan (percussion/vocals; hale and hearty), and Ciarán (Dafydd's seven-years-younger baby brother, by the way). They are, alternately, and per Super Furry parlance, each known by a cuddly mononym: Gruff ("Griff"), Bunf, Guto ("Gitto"), Daf ("Dav"), and Cian. Gruff plays left-handed, without restringing, such that the high E is topmost on the guitar. His is the signature baritone, the group's calling-card. But Bunf and Daf sing like frontmen in their own right. None of the five can read music, but they'll leap octaves like the Beach Boys, harmonize like same, change keys on a dime, cram about five separate songs' worth of melodies into three or four minutes, and generally mash up all manner of modes and styles until the end result is unrecognizable as any of the above, until it is wholly their own. ‘We played in Japan, and people in Japan were singing back to us in Welsh.’ That last tendency — or rather, the repudiation of it — has often been cited as the impetus behind the comparatively barebonesMwng. Story goes that the previous album, 1999's Guerrilla — by Cian's own telling, "a lavish experience...weeks and weeks in the studio" — failed to meet pop-chart expectations, possibly on account of a certain kitchen-sink overstuffedness, in response to which the band declared a "pop strike." They then set about writing and rehearsing the all-Welsh array that was to become Mwng, for which Cian avers the recording and mixing process took a grand total of nine to ten days. It was, he says, "an opportunity, almost by default, to take a step back and sort of familiarize yourself again with what you used to do before you had money to go to the studio....We didn't have time to work into the production and all, and I don't think the songs needed it so much, either." So was Mwng an overt political gesture, an effort to preserve and promulgate Welsh language and culture? A Metal Machine Music–type raging-against-the-music-biz-apparatus? A disavowal of the work that'd come before — the brashness of debut LP Fuzzy Logic, the manic busyness of Guerrilla — signaling a newfound seriousness of purpose? Only, says Cian, with "the luxury of hindsight." As is the SFA way, Mwng was an organic outgrowth, an intuitive next step. "For us it was just going back to what we were doing ten years before," he says. "Everyone had been in bands previously and had recorded exclusively in Welsh. So it was a natural thing for us. Gruff, I think, hadn't sung in English till he was twenty-six....It might be obvious to others where certain times [are a] turning point, or whatever. Which at the time you don't think about, or it's not obvious." Even so, the album resonated in ways that Cian, today, clearly finds vindicating. "It opened doors. It allowed us an invite to come to the States to do a two-week tour for the first time. We played in Japan, and people in Japan were singing back to us in Welsh, just singing the phonetics. And people had seen it as a real language, not a dead or a dying language." So it seems fair to say, whatever the motivation, the album was the needed shot in the arm, the vital bridge to the charming raft of LPs to follow: 2001's pretty-much-undisputed-masterpiece Rings Around the World, 2005's beloved concept work Love Kraft, 2007's song-for-song-great Hey Venus! And maybe, just maybe, it's at least partially responsible for the Furries' all-but-unrivaled longevity. As Cian notes, "It's the same five members in the band, still the same five onstage, still the same five in the studio, and nine albums by the same-five lineup. Which is, I don't know, I'm sure there's — it's not unique, but I'm sure there's not many." As for going forward, is this reunion a harbinger of things to come — possibly heralding a new album, maybe? Cian's coy on this point, except to say that it might all hinge on the fortunes of the Welsh national soccer team. "We've got a really good chance of qualifying for the Euros next year in France," he says. "And you know, that could see the return of the Furries going back to the studio. Every country has a sort of theme song when they go to these tournaments...Yeah, that might make us go back to the studio."
SFA are going to open for Noel Gallagher on his 2016 UK arena tour. I really hope this means they're planning a new LP. Glasgow, The SSE Hydro (April 21) Aberdeen, AECC (April 24) Liverpool, Echo Arena (April 25) Leeds, First Direct Arena (April 27) Birmingham, Genting Arena (April 29) Bournemouth, BIC (April 30)
West coast US dates!! 02/04/2016 Vancouver, BC / The Imperial 02/05/2016 Portland, OR / Sabertooth Music Festival - Crystal Ballroom 02/06/2016 Seattle, WA / The Neptune Theatre 02/09/2016 San Francisco, CA / Great American Music Hall 02/11/2016 West Hollywood, CA / The Roxy Theatre
Went to the SF show; It was great, as expected. Possibly a slightly scaled-down set from previous US tours? I really didn't expect to have a chance to see them again, so it was an extra-special night. Small venue - I'm just amazed these guys don't have a bigger following stateside. Also, I loooove the opener, Heron Oblivion. Examples of Great Modern Psychedelia »
I wish there were more Super Furry fans here in the U.S. also. Zakyfarms-what do you mean scaled down? I'm going in May hopefully, the tickets haven't even sold out and it's a small venue. I've never seen them live so it'll be fun. Glad they got together after the hiatus. I originally found out in Mojo that they were back summer of last year. I thought they broke up for sure.
