Try as I may, I can't really get into the Super Furry Animals' latest album, Hey Venus! I lauded their last album, Love Kraft, thusly: "the slowed pace has enabled the Super Furry Animals to make the most coherent and focused album of their career, and even if their whirlwind compositions no longer make your head spin, there are still many gorgeous subtleties to be found in their characteristically lush orchestrations and brilliant pop melodies." (Take a trip in the wayback machine here.)
Hey Venus! doesn't quite have the stately strut of Love Kraft, but the mood and the sound are similar enough. So why can't I get into it? I've never heard an album by these guys that I didn't like until this one.
The answer I keep coming up with is that this one feels kind of half-assed. For an album that clocks in at under 40 minutes, it sags a lot. A handful of the songs, at three minutes, still feel too long by a minute. A couple of them sound like song titles that were stretched into songs as fast as they could be written ("Baby Ate My Eightball," "The Gift That Keeps Giving"). Then there's "Run-Away," which is either a very lazily written song, or some kind of experiment in how many elements of other songs can be borrowed without giving any credit. Songs checked on that list include "Be My Baby" (drums), "What Becomes of the Brokenhearted" (melody) "Every Time We Say Goodbye" (lyrics) and, uh, "Runaway" (title), but I'm sure Led Zeppelin still has them beat somehow or another. It's also the best and most interesting song on the album.
Listening to Hey Venus! makes me feel the same way that I do when I listen to Steely Dan. It's eminently listenable, immaculately recorded and produced (as usual for the Super Furry Animals), and there's a part of me that feels like I'm being had for even trying to take this so seriously (never more so than during the baffling "Suckers!").
Maybe I can break it out in two or three years when they put another album out and it'll sound a lot better.
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