Hearing that a new Super Furry Animals album is close to release is always enough to excite me, and so it was when I first started hearing and reading talk about Hey Venus over the past couple of months.
This week, the album was released and... Man, what a disappointment. :o( Sure, there are one or two catchy tracks in there (with current single Show Your Hand being the pick of the bunch), but aside from that it's possibly the most bland collection of songs the band have ever managed to put together. For a band that has always delighted in fusing more traditionally indie and pop influences with what can only be described as psychedelic techno, the almost complete absence of the latter has left this album with what amounts to little more than a series of cookie cutter tracks - Lyrically clever in places (as always), but almost entirely lacking in punch. No moments to make the hair on the back of your neck stand up or have you grinning from ear to ear, the whole CD is really an exercise in mediocrity. I know the band have fallen on hard times financially and are doubtless looking for a more mainstream release to help tend to their bank accounts, but I'm not entirely sure that largely culling some of the properties that have made the band so unique is a good idea.
It seems that 2007 has been quite the year for good artists releasing uninspired new albums - The Scissor Sisters, The White Stripes, and now Super Furry Animals. Maybe this really is the death of the album that the media have been talking about so much recently....
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