Singles : Golden Retriever [7", CD, DVD], Hello Sunshine [7", CD, DVD]
Phantom Phorce
Placid Casual ~ 19 April 04 (additional copies released late May)
Beggar's Group USA ~ 14 September 04 : North American release details
US order from: amazon.com
Wishing Tree Records/Empyrean Records US LP ~ 5 November 04
Toy's Factory Japan ~ 6 July 04
Tracklisting: Hello Sunshine remixed by Weevil, Liberty Belle ~ remixed by Mario Caldato Jnr, Golden Retriever ~ remixed by Killa Kela, Sex, War And Robots ~ remixed by Wauvenfold, The Piccolo Snare ~ remixed by Four Tet, Venus + Serena ~ remixed by Massimo, Father, Father ~ remixed by Boom Bip, Bleed Forever ~ remixed by Bravecaptain, Out Of Control ~ remixed by Zan Lyons, Cityscape Skybaby ~ remixed by Minotaur Shock, Valet Parking ~ remixed by High Llamas, The Undefeated ~ remixed by Llwybr Llaethog, Slow Life ~ remixed by Sir Doufous Styles, Valet Parking ~ remixed by Force Unknown, Hello Sunshine ~ remixed by Freiband
Single : Slow Life EP included with limited edition
Slow Life ~ Super Furry Animals, Motherfokker ~ SFA + Goldie Lookin Chain, Lost Control ~ Super Furry Animals, Re-Working Of Out Of Control
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See also:
prior : 04 |
prior : 03 |
press : 04 |
press : 03 |
press : reviews
Album notes:
"Speakers and microphones work on phantom power, there's no batteries and they're not connected to the mains, and yet they work. Similarly, as a band our make up is the same as anybody else and yet we write songs and play music to people, and we have no idea why. It's a mysterious power source. I like the idea of it, a phantom power that nobody understands.
"Phantom Power also sounds like a sinister power source that controls the world from beyond people's comprehension. And a lot of the things that go on today seem completely illogical and I think we watch the world go by with disbelief."
Gruff Rhys is talking about the sixth Super Furry Animals' album ~ Phantom Power (seven if you include 1998's Outspaced rarities compilation). Never badged as an 'issue' band, nevertheless SFA have discussed contemporary themes throughout their life-time: global warming on 'Northern Lites' and 'Alternate Route To Vulcan Street', communication overload ('(Drawing) Rings Around The World' and 'Wherever I Lay My Phone (That's My Home)' or the death of rural communities ('Pan Ddaw'r Wawr'). And to a point Phantom Power is no different: songs of war, loss of life and radiation feature. As Gruff says, "We seem to be living in such a heavy time. We're just absorbing all the words thrown at us from the TV and regurgitating them back.
 I suppose its almost unavoidable that lyrics like that are coming out at this point when almost all our entertainment is based around war. Musically as a band we tend to regurgitate what we absorb from our record collections, and lyrically I suppose the same goes, the topics of conversations over the last couple of years have been based around violence more than usual. We've been put on high-paranoia alert by the media!"
And yet... Phantom Power just might also be the Super Furries' most personal album yet. "There are a lot of songs on this record about broken relationships and war, and I think they go hand in hand. But always with a positive outlook to the future." Originally conceived as a ten-song song-cycle based around the tuning of D-A-D-D-A-D, some of the 'Father Father' songs (the album actually contains two lush interludes entitled 'Father Father') reflect the meditative side to the band. But there again... the first single 'Golden Retriever' is a DADDAD song that confronts the outdated lexicon of bluesmen language, and 'Out Of Control', another song in DADDAD might be the heaviest-metal-est SFA moment yet, as it ironically spews back TV-speak.
So forget duality. Phantom Power is a mood-bigamist. Musically, this magnificent record is as schizophrenic as past SFA efforts. Recorded during the second half of 2002 with engineering help from long-time collaborator Gorwel Owen and Tony Doogan ("who's worked with half of Glasgow") a lot of the album was shaped "In our own studio late at night in an office block in Cardiff. We'd erect tents in the corridors at nights to record acoustic guitars and we'd have to take them all down in the morning before other people our neighbours came to work.
 "There's a dressmaker next door, an interior designers the other side, on the floor above is No.Brake, the people who do our website and have been producing the DVD, so we could work on the visuals and the sound simultaneously. Our percussionist Kris Jenkins has a studio downstairs and he was working on our remixes and the dressmaker made some balloons for one of the films - I think the whole building was involved at some point."
It's disingenuous with SFA to use the band's previous albums as pointers to the form of their current songs. If there is any link between 2000's extravagant opus Rings Around The World and Phantom Power it might be in the overall tone of the record (although Gruff concedes "I think this one's less satirical."), but not the music. This warm, honest often acoustic-based album is a leap away from the techno excesses of Rings Around The World.
"We didn't really feel any pressure to show off, we just wanted to impress ourselves. The last record was the first for our new label, and we wanted to make a completely over the top ambitious album because it might have been the only chance we'd get to make the sort of album where we could hire engineers and expensive studios for a crazy length of time. We took full advantage of it - that was our brief to ourselves. It was a similar approach to our first album where we were used to recording in Gorwel Owen's house. We saw Fuzzy Logic as an opportunity to spend six weeks in a residential studio with a Jacuzzi and three meals a day. I think we would have made a better sounding album back in our Gorwel Owen's house. And we did with Radiator.
"Similarly with this album we didn't feel any pressure to make a follow up to Rings Around The World production-wise, we were able to follow our own noses and experiment with engineering it ourselves. I think it's warmer; we wanted to make a more human record. The last one was made by scientists and a computer. To a certain extent there's less to talk about and more to listen to on this album."
Track by track, by Gruff Rhys:
1/ Hello Sunshine
  The voices at the beginning are a sample of Wendy and Bonnie. There's a sense of loss in the sample: a sense of longing. I suppose it's a courting ballad with a 'been so down looks like up to me' mentality. Its easy to wallow in misery, it's the most comfortable place to be. But it's always worth trying to get out of it.
2/ Liberty Belle
 For this I devised cartoon characters called Liberty Belle and Memory Lane, and Liberty Belle I suppose represents the bells of freedom and Memory Lane represents history's harsh lessons that Liberty Belle always forgets. Liberty Belle represents the American Dream, which is all conquering and has no fear. She's young, innocent and carefree, skipping along... Memory Lane is the flipside, the one that's learnt from history's harsh realities. Its sung from the perspective of a bird living almost in a parallel universe to humans, oblivious to the gravity of the games which are being played around us. I think that's how I feel a lot of the time, and a lot of other people do too.
3/ Golden Retriever
  I listen to a lot of people like Davey Graham, a lot of British folk and bluesmen and European acoustic musicians from the fifties and sixties, and musically 'Golden Retriever' has that kind of feel. The lyrics are a blues parody ~ "I met the devil at the roundabout" I tried to update blues vocabulary, because I think that one of the things that bothers me most about rock and roll music is that people keep regurgitating the same words. I try to make my own clich�s, you know? It also coincided with passing my driving test a few years back, which had a great affect on my life. In studying for my theory test I had to absorb a lot of road sign and driving theory vocabulary, which has made its way into songs like 'Golden Retriever' and 'Valet Parking'.
4/ Sex, War And Robots
 Bunf discovered the pedal steel during the recording of the last album and he's played it on 'Hello Sunshine' and 'Bleed Forever' [on Phantom Power]. On this one we got a pedal steel player from Cardiff called John 'Catfish' Thomas for this track. There are a lot of songs on this record about broken relationships and war, and I think they go hand in hand, but always with a positive outlook to the future.
5/ Piccolo Snare
 Piccolo Snare is a song about societies torn apart by war and the waste of human life for nothing, pawns in a worthless game. A lot of the vocabulary for that song comes from the Falklands War, the Malvinas War, whatever you want to call it: "Tumbledown" and "Skyhawks", etcetera. It could be about any war, but that was a war I remembered from when I was a kid where people from my area were dying, as the media tried to maintain some ridiculous degree of jingoism... Apart from using the vocabulary it's generally a song about people's misguided belief in flags. All flags are tarnished; they were only invented so that people wouldn't shoot their own side in the war. It's a song in at least three parts. It starts off folk rock in feel, and builds up to a cosmic funk coda!
6/ Venus And Serena
It's about a child, who can't communicate with his elders, growing up with two pet tortoises called Venus and Serena. But he feels that the reptiles understand. I suppose its similar to 'Liberty Belle' in that sense, in that in this day and age the turtle seems to take on an image of wisdom compared to the people elected to governors. It uses tennis vocabulary to make the point. Venus and Serena have beautiful names and they seem to have exemplary powers. I think its about making pictures in people's minds.
I'm trying to get into balladeering and narrative in songs, but I don't think I've perfected it by any means. You can put this one down to my struggle with narrative! After a song like 'Piccolo Snare' you need a bit of light to make sure that people don't go out and jump off the nearest bridge. We feel we have some social responsibility to uplift people.
7 & 11/ Father Father
These were in the DADDAD tunings. I think it puts some breathing space in the album. They also help to join songs together in mood, they help to bring the album down, or build it up again and give it some kind of consistency. They were originally the bookends of the song-cycle.
8/ Bleed Forever
 'Bleed Forever' is about the radiation that descended all over North Wales after Chernobyl, and the general proliferation of nuclear power stations in the area. There was a huge increase in leukaemia in children and some livestock are still not allowed to be sold on the market. There's even a Geiger counter feel to Cian's synth on this song! This was recorded pretty much live. Often during a live take I sing the wrong lyric, so the line about the skin care consultant ended up staying in. I suppose we didn't care necessarily if it was in tune or not just as long as it sounded human. I suppose it's about how you don't see radiation and how you don't really know if it's affecting you or not. And how it could wipe whole cultures out. Another invisible, or 'phantom', power source.
9/ Out Of Control
 It's our most Iron Maiden song. I think 'Golden Retriever' is pretty heavy rock as well. I think its pre-metal, if you want to get technical. "Ninja Jihad" sounds like a ridiculous cartoon character. They're very flippant lyrics, they just regurgitate what we see: everything seems out of control. It's like an over-dramatic theme to a current affairs programme! Again it's in DADDAD. It balances out the album - musically it wakes it up when it could fall asleep.
10/ Cityscape Skybaby
When we went to Colombia in 1997 we got invited to this Marxist village, they were having this five day fiesta to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the murder of the local landowner. It's a song inspired by that, but moved to a Russian pre-Revolutionary setting! We have such a derivative chorus at the end to counterbalance lines like "she came in smelling of cabbages".
12/ Valet Parking
 
 The album builds up to an uplifting ending, into an euphoric climax. I think 'Valet Parking' lifts it up a gear. It's a song I actually wrote while driving, which I wouldn't recommend to anyone if they want to keep their license. We tried to recreate a traffic jam in rural Monmouthshire - we mic'd up four of our cars, and revved them in time to the track. It's about a road trip from Cardiff to Vilnius. It's a love song to the process, to the road. Apart from 'Autobahn' by Kraftwerk not enough songs have been written about the glories of pan-European travel. The title is also a reference to the Brazilian songwriter Marcos Valle, who this song is dedicated to.
13/ The Undefeated
 It's about underdogs, and over-dogs. It's a real simple lyric. "Noise pollution solution"... It's a pop song with biblical references, and no specific issue or event in mind, although I probably wrote it when the Welsh football team were going through their worse period of results in their history. It just shows how sometimes your fantasies can come true, and now the song, apart from the title, doesn't fit at all. It's about, even at your lowest, seeing a ray of light.
14/ Slow Life
 It's the most epic song on the album - it was either going to start it or finish it because it dwarfs all the other songs. It starts off with an electro cop show style intro, which we jammed on top of and Sean O'Hagan did some amazing strings... the lyrics are just regurgitating what we hear on the news, recycled, vomiting them all back. I like the idea that even the mountains have memories and that people don't forget things easily.
DVD
Another element contiguous with Rings Around The World is that Phantom Power will become the second Super Furries album to be simultaneously released on DVD. SFA are the first band to do this... twice. "We're still experimenting with the technology, and refining it. We enjoyed doing the last one but we thought we could take it further. Last time the technology wasn't really accessible to make an album like that at home which it is now. Also a lot of the technology is more accessible for people to hear it this time. When we do things we tend to do it properly, we don't give up on things until we've bled it dry, you know? [Laughs] 'Til we've covered it comprehensively.
"I think what people missed on the last one was that the DVD was created primarily for the surround sound mix. What we constantly want to remind people is that it's an audio medium as much as a visual medium. [SO GET THOSE SPEAKERS OUT OF THEIR BOXES] Too much emphasis was given on 'there's a video for every song', whereas the reason we made it was because of our surround sound gigs: we wanted to capture that on record. That's what we've done again really. This time the films are more minimal, but Pete Fowler's done 14 animations that are between the songs rather than during and the films that have been made for the songs are almost like screensavers - otherwise there's too much information going on and you don't listen to the music."
Phantom Power is released on 21 July 2003, preceded by a single 'Golden Retriever', on 14 July [UK]
~ 16 May, published by superfurrylogic.com, thanks to Joe; words theirs; edits, formatting and links ours ~ not for republishing elsewhere
Remixers
The Phantom Power DVD and Phantom Phorce CD contain seventeen remixes. Explore the work of these artists through these website and album links:
~ by superfurrylogic.com
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Super Furry Animals
Hello Sunshine
