The Super Furry Animals (or the best show I’ve seen all year)
Metro 11/20
(Note, if you click on the actual blog SFA title above, the pictures get larger)
I’d heard reports that their shows on this tour were a bit lacking because of the fact that Love Kraft isn’t as easily accessible. Apparently, early on in their tour, they were beginning their set playing a huge chunk of Love Kraft songs, which turned off the audience members that wanted to hear their old tunes. That said, I rather like Love Kraft. It has it’s share of transcendent moments and qualities that make it a rather experiential sort of album for me. What I mean by that is that it can’t just be “background” or something you just have playing. As in the case of many of their other albums, it really requires some active listening. There are just so many sounds and dynamics to the songs themselves you can’t help but be captivated. It’s true they may have gotten less catchy overall and more abstract but in the way they’ve done this it shows growth in my opinion and keeps me intrigued by what they might put out next.
Now, part of the wonder of seeing the Super Furry Animals is that they are also great performers, Gruff Rhys especially. So, as you’ll see if you look at the above pictures, in addition to the visuals and videos for each song, Rhys at one point during “Receptacle for the Respectable” eats celery on stage. All five of them wore these bizarre glow in the dark outfits and at one pointn Rhys donned his bright red helmet. At another point, he sang his vocals through a special device that is built like the front of a motorcycle (including the windshield.) The set opened up with a video of SFA OK the band in this little motorized device coming to the rescue of…? (cue suspenseful music) and ended with them getting back into this larger truck and driving away after showing us a video of sped up scenes they must have taken earlier on in the day of Chicago.
This show was different than their other shows on this tour it seems because they actually played past album material early on, including “Golden Retriever” their second song in. About halfway through the first set, they also played, “Run Christian Run,” and “Hello Sunshine,” as well as “Slow Life.” They ended this set with “Receptacle for the Respectable.” The new songs came off well too and the crowded audience was really into them. I thought “Zoom” and “Ohio Heat”came off exceptionally well. Gruff introduced “Ohio Heat,” by telling us that it was about how they had been in Austin, Texas when a cell phone left on the bar went off and the person calling was Ohio Heat and then they had to store their identities in a convent as they traveled back to the nineteenth century. It was rather endearing as it made no whatsoever.) Gruff also told us a little about cloudberries before singing that three part song off of Love Kraft.
For a wonderfully captivating encore, they played “Juxtaposed With U,” “Rings Around the World,” “Calimero” (the song about the Italian chicken), and ended with a super long extended mix of “The Man Don’t Give a F*ck” which is a political and revolutionary song about how our political leaders are liars who don’t care about the people of their country. The energy sort of culminated at this point and they left us really on top at this perfect point of all of us feeling we all had something in common we could relate to.
November 22nd, 2005 at 11:44 am
I also thought that “Ohio Heat” came off well at the show I saw in New York, though they didn’t introduce it that way. And they played “Slow Life” at the show I saw, but that was the first song of their encore. They didn’t play it in hte main set.
November 22nd, 2005 at 11:07 pm
lol yeah that was a really disjointed ramble of his I thought but I sort of like those jet laggy musician rambles. It really makes a show for me oddly enough becuase, you know, it’s not like you can hear that on record so in some senses the banter makes the songs even more exceptional and I rather like hearing the background of where songs came from or what inspired them as well.
December 20th, 2005 at 8:16 pm
[...] So, of course, the first thing I thought of was the “Cloudberries” song off the Super Furry Animals album known as Love Kraft. Seeing them live they performed this song and said a bit about how it was about berries that looked like clouds. I guess I thought that was just their nickname vs. an official name. I stood there stunned in the store just imagining Gruff Rhys and co. picking them (sort of like all those days I’ve daydreamed about Jens picking lingonberries in the forests of Sweden with a guitar around his back and singing songs about war protests and girls that are just a little nuts). [...]