Any self-respecting Super Furry Animals fan, and even the most casual sideline critical observer, would agree with one thing: mainstream success should have been theirs. As much as the band were/are a musical cause de celebre, as a commercial and mainstream entity they never made the breakthrough, and the chances of achieving it are receding at a rate matched only by their collective hairlines. In fact, any mention of Super Furry Animals often gives off more than a whiff of what-if analysis: however feted they are, they've never captured public consciousness in the same way as their column inch-grabbing peers. They're the ones that got away. The Welsh boys who had it all. Always the bridesmaid, etc, etc. The same retrospective mindset applies when considering a new album, in this case Dark Days/Light Years; bolstered by an ample, changeably eclectic and fantastical catalogue, any new release is, somewhat cripplingly, measured against that heavyweight yardstick.

So, why is this the case?

In simple terms, Super Furry Animals are the lightning rod when it comes to channelling those various uncharted degrees that separate 'pop' from 'rock'. Their nine album history casts effervescent lyrical whimsy alongside a buouyant and life-affirming tunefulness, one which is never shy of showing off its craft; their approach has always been carefree without ever being careless, ensuring that their stock is always high, unfathomably high. Anything goes in the Utopian SFA-ville, and given their propensity to flit from style to style, genre to genre, Philly soul to bubblegum-pop, techno euphoria to psychedelic anthems, it's difficult to think of them as anything other than a gaggle of Mr. Benns in amongst a music emporium.

Outside of this clued-up clique, though, lies SFA's problem - or rather the general public's problem. Joe iTunes is a simple man; he likes the Radio 1 playlist; he likes music to soundtrack his hair gel application; he likes new music that sounds tried and tested; his tastes range from the nodding acceptance of the boys at the football to foot-tapping tunery garnering smiling approval from the future mother-in-law. Mass public acceptance is difficult to come by for a native-tongue singing, Beatle vegetable-munching, pedal steel-touting band who sing of boys, raised by wolves, whose closest friends are pet turtles. To the everyman, Super Furry Animals, it seems, put the Id in idiocy.

Perpetually at the threshold of greatness, with impressive/oppressive songbook in hand, what does 2009 have in store for the new album? Whilst 2008 was toured in fits and starts, at the time Super Furries were more of a consortium than a single-minded gang: Gruff Rhys symphonied playboy car designers with the chromic dazzle of Neon Neon, whilst keyboardist Cian Ciaran continued analogue-friendly electronic dabblings with his Acid Casuals. The most telling SFA splinter group, though, were The Peth - a rag-taggle bunch formed of Super Furry debris, various Cymru ne'erdowells, and Wales' pre-eminent celluloid drip tray addict* whose sole preserve is to crucify music using only their mastery of tiresome, rancid, lorry driver rock - for their unshiftable, odious stain is all over the latest set.

Tellingly, the band have announced that this latest album has been sourced from ideas worked out in soundchecks and jams. The result arrives with frontman Gruff Rhys unfamiliarly side-tracked: the peculiar lyrical embellishments and quaint melodic tinge of the frontman aren't felt as strongly as before, seemingly content to only occasionally step out of the shadows. At best it alters the band dynamic to a more combustible, unheard groove-orientated enterprise. At worst their singular oddities are blunted; Rhys' idiosyncratic pop concepts seem almost dialled in, the onus left on the rest of SFA to reheat some invention-lobotomized rock by way of compensation. This is not a good place to be.

Opener Crazy Naked Girls sets the tone. For all the glistening teutonic voodoo industry of its opening charge it soon dissolves into the type of heavy rock heavy weather preferred by people who like to jam, headbang and still use the word "freak" and "out" in close proximity. Example: the song includes one riff and at least eight false finales with nary a melody in earshot. Inconvenience is a tired, lumbering chug-a-thon that fails to ignite any fiery dynamism a la Do Or Die, or circumnavigate its self-inflicted cliché with the pep and swagger of Golden Retriever. White Socks/Flip Flops too is a shambling blues rocker and goes through the type of screechingly inept larval motions that if it came direct from Scotland, wrapped in strange socialist views, and had ingredients clearly marked 'nuts' and 'bolts' you'd have to rub your eyes to make sure it wasn't birthed by Primal Scream.

The alarming thing is that this is as distant from the Super Furries track record as it's possible to get. It's almost as if they've forgotten, or chosen to forget, what made them the enlightened free thinkers. Jammed-out soundcheck odds and sods seem beneath the Super Furries: it's a cruise control setting that we're not used to finding our distinctive musical and lyrical eccentrics stuck on. Take Cardiff In The Sun, a bundle of dim proggy heartbeats, faint exotica and mystical swirly hand gestures, is, to be honest, the type of thing that Super Furry Animals thrived on being the prickly antidote to. It also a carbon copy of the Earlies' One Of Us Is Dead in all but name, and an extended flight of minimal musicality that's workmanlike and repetitious to the degree that after the first 32 bars it descends into a babbling nothingness.

An alternative to this hammering boredom (i.e. the good bits) is when Rhys' imagination - a ripe playground of outlandish whimsy even in his moments of restraint - is granted the freedom to run amok. Inaugural Trams is the album's first 'Yes!!' moment - a punch-the-air triumph of soundtracking pure fancy in a fanstatically unexpected and totally acccesible manner. Trams has Rhys' desires take on the role of Eastern European town planner, outlining his scheme for an integrated transport network. Peculiar? Yes, but set to a pop Eurobeat with lascivious German porn star rapping (courtesy of Franz Ferdinand's Nick McCarthy) it takes on a sheen which is both wholly innovative and magical, all this whilst inadvertently sounding like the 118-247 ad with Robert Fripp guesting. Still not convinced? Then be sure that only a genius can birth the following couplet: "I will design a town in the image of your face/Around the wrinkles of your eyes my footsteps you can trace."

Elsewhere, simplistic joy is found in Helium Hearts (stirring, sweet and occasionally shrill), Moped Eyes (a collision of gurgling synths and charming, Ian Dury-imbibed, non sequiturs) and the familiar upbeat strains of Where Do You Wanna Go? and its Welsh language companion piece of Lliwau Llachar - the twin-recorded summertime daydream results of drinking Beach Boys manna in pure concentrate. It's in these moments that reminders are served that, as a collective, the band seem unlikely, even incapable, of conjuring anything other than elaborate, decorative, captivating and hands-down gorgeous spoils.

Everything Super Furry Animals have previously touched has been habitually heroic and necessary. They have taken bold, novel musical decisions to save others - the more celebrated and dim-witted - from the headache. Decisions that, throughout their career, proved to be uniformally correct. Dark Days/Light Years shows signs of that touch becoming clumsy, inessential and laboured: whilst flashes of the gleeful abandon occasionally shine, its general crutch of overwrought riffage and screechingly dull grooves masquerade those fleeting inspirational moments and all the ennobling hallmarks that made Super Furry Animals true originals in the first place. Dark Days/Light Years is the sound of repair, unecessary repair, an aspirational clear-the-head detox, the search for a fresh impetus and a reinvigorated verve. Yet this fighting fit patient doesn't need a remedy, and, unfortunately, for the most part, the small print on Dark Days' resulting perscription simply reads: nil by ear.

* - Richard Burton and Anthony Hopkins apart 

Release date: 13/04/2009
Artist website: www.superfurry.com
Label: Rough Trade

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