Tag Archives: super furry animals

#1398: Super Furry Animals – Torra Fy Ngwallt Yn Hir

Leave a reply

According to Spotify, Super Furry Animals’ ‘Torra Fy Ngwallt Yn Hir’ was my tenth most played song on the platform in 2018. That sounds about right. I wouldn’t know the numbers exactly, but I do remember listening to that one a lot that year, for sure. It was then that I was in my first job out of university. I was working in a music studio, in a position that didn’t require a lot of supervision, and a lot of time was spent listening to artists’ discographies in the large gaps between having actual tasks to do. I went through SFA’s over a week or something. Radiator, being the band’s second album, was the second in the list. Even though that particular record had been in my personal iTunes library since about 2014, it was during that relisten that my ears pricked up when ‘Torra…’ was playing out of the speakers. So there you go. Sometimes you leave an album alone, you come back to it years later, and a song on there you never thought twice about becomes one of your favourites.

Super Furry Animals are a band from Wales, a country part of the United Kingdom. The people of Wales do speak English, but they take pride in their native Welsh language too. This is a roundabout way of getting to the point that ‘Torra Fy Ngwallt Yn Hir’ is sung completely in Welsh, if you were confused when laying your eyes on the song’s title. Translated, it means ‘Cut My Hair Long’, and the entire track is a request by its narrator to a pair of magic scissors so their long hair covers their ears, eyelashes, goes “right down to [their] arse”, and is in a state to the point that people refuse to sit next to the narrator on the bus. Again, it’s not like I know all of this off the dome, this website helped. The song’s just under two minutes in length, but it gets the job done. And it’s a special one in a way. Before making their Welsh language-only record, Mwng, in 2000, ‘Torra…’ was the only track on the band’s first three albums to be sung entirely in their native tongue.

On Radiator, ‘Torra…’ follows another sub-two minute track in the form of ‘Chupacabras’, a punkier composition and a bit of freak-out compared to the poppier, melodic route that ‘Torra…’ goes down. It’s cool to have such a whiplash in moods provided by the two numbers. Even if I can’t properly sing along to ‘Torra…’, failing in getting the pronunciation down and so forth, it doesn’t stop me from at least trying. One thing I like a lot about the track is that it doesn’t appear to have a chorus of any kind. It’s three repeats of the verse structure, with some variations in the lyrics, until it eventually gets to the “Siswrn!” bridge where the melody changes. But even then, that repeats itself a few times before going back to the verse again. And then when that verse is done, the final line is hammered home before the song burns out in some ascending synth swoops. It’s a song where repetition is key. Gets into your head much easier that way.

#1341: Super Furry Animals – The Teacher

Leave a reply

Guerilla was the first Super Furry Animals album I ever checked out. One time, when I was about ten or something, I was watching MTV2 when the video for ‘Do or Die’ came on. That is the second song on Guerrilla and was released as its final single. And I thought it sounded cool. That was in 2005 or something. But life happened, and it wasn’t until seven years later that I remembered the song existed. I revisited it, it sounded as good as I remembered, and I went on to listen to the rest of the album as a result. I have this headcanon that, with the new millennium fast approaching and a little uncertainty in the wind, some artists were compelled to just do some of their most out-there work in the last couple years of the ’90s to leave a mark before the world possibly ended. You check out what albums were coming out around ’98 – ’99 and you might see what I’m saying. Well, Guerrilla always gave me that kind of feeling in that, up to that point, it was certainly their most experimental effort.

On the album, you’ll get a song in the style of calypso (‘Northern Lites’), another made to be one of those novelty hits in the charts that are a little annoying but can’t help but love (‘Wherever I Lay My Phone’), a little dip into electronic, downtempo music (‘Some Things Come from Nothing’). There’s a whole lot of variety. So when ‘The Teacher’ comes along in the album’s final legs, it kind of throws you off just because, since ‘Do or Die’ many tracks earlier, the album hasn’t offered a lot of straight rock and roll, but here it is again with ‘The Teacher’ just in case you forgot that the band could still rock out from time to time. And how well they do it too. With a melody that’s sounds very much like one you’d hear in the school playground back in the day, Gruff Rhys and co take on the perspective of a teacher who wants to quit their job, run away from home and just write songs and be in a band. Until now, I thought it was from the point of view of a young student. It could still very well be both.

Now, this track is a lot of undisputable fun. Gruff Rhys starts the track off by screaming alongside the keyboard, screaming that continues underneath the song while it’s going on, and that energy is matched and never lets up as soon as the rest of the band join in for the first verse. Someone, I think Rhys himself, sings along the main melody an octave higher. There’s generally a lot of high-pitched harmonies and vocal deliveries all around, adding to the manic hyperactivity of the proceedings, which I think is summed up in the “La-la-la-la” refrains. Slotted in between the trippy ‘Door to This House Remains Open’ and the balladry of ‘Fire in My Heart’, ‘The Teacher’ continues the eclectic mixture of styles the entire album builds its ground on. It is a straight rock-n-roller, but in the context of the album it arrives as a sort of refreshing moment. I’m all for it. Listen to Guerrilla, everybody.

#1242: Super Furry Animals – Something 4 the Weekend

2 Replies

Shame to say, or maybe it isn’t (depends how you feel about Super Furry Animals), but ‘Something 4 the Weekend’ will be the only representative from the Welsh band’s debut album Fuzzy Logic. I heard that album for the first time in 2014, but didn’t really hear it, if you know what I mean. I got my first job out of uni a few years later, but found that there was a lot of downtime the majority of the time. So I went ahead and choose to listen to SFA’s discography from beginning to end. ‘Something 4 the Weekend’ was the only song on Fuzzy Logic that I really liked. The LP’s a strong start to a catalogue. But their albums got stronger as they went along. ‘Least to these ears.

Sounds to me like this is a song about taking too many drugs. Actually, maybe not about taking too many, but just about them in general. Singer and guitarist Gruff Rhys also mentioned it was about sex too. What time is the best for those two vices? The weekend, obviously, hence the title. I’m sure there’s a quote that verifies that hypothesis somewhere. The song’s first verse details the narrator’s increasing usage of drugs (“stuck it on the back of my tongue and then swallowed it”), the second covers the sex part (“stuck it right up and that was the end of it”), and the chorus is where the narrator tells us that he’s always thinking about the two things with the aid of an easy, memorable melody. Also, you may notice that Gruff Rhys has this thing where where he pronounces words like “getting” as “gerring”. That’s not something he can help. He’s just very Welsh.

I then went on to find that this song wasn’t originally recorded this way. On initial copies of Fuzzy Logic, the song was titled ‘Something for the Weekend’. It’s essentially the same track, but faster in delivery, somewhat rawer in production and had a different intro. I’m going to hazard a guess that it was a record company decision that led to the re-recording of the tune, to make it something easier to play on the radio or whatever. You know how those businesses go. But on this occasion, I’d probably agree that it was the right choice. The song got released as ‘Something 4 the Weekend’ name, charted within the top 20 of the UK singles chart, and the ‘new’ single version eventually went on to replace the original when later copies of the album were sold. That original’s out there, though. Right below this paragraph, actually. You might like that version more. There’s no going wrong.

#1049: Super Furry Animals – Play It Cool

Leave a reply

Here’s another one by Welsh band Super Furry Animals and yet another one from their sophomore album Radiator, released back in 1997. I only wrote about the second track on that record the other day, so you can get a bit of background on my experience with it. Unlike ‘The Placid Casual’, I don’t recall ‘Play It Cool’ having much of an effect on me during that first listen through Radiator. I had a mission of listening through SFA’s whole discography in 2014 which had to come to a halt because of second year studies at university. I eventually got round to doing so in 2018 during work hours in my first job after those studies finished. It was a very lax workplace, so I could get away with listening to albums on Spotify for nearly the whole day. It’s all a bit hazy, but I want to say it was around then that ‘Play It Cool’ clicked and went on to become one of my favourite Furry songs.

Essentially the track is made up of little riffs, hooks and catchy scales, all delivered with an earwormy melody that when assembled altogether create such a fun three-minute pop-rock sensation. I mean, that’s essentially what all songs are. But in this case, ‘Play It Cool’ begins with its three-chord riff followed by that sweet ascending keyboard riff which arrives after the opening drum roll. The vocals announce themselves into the mix with a “Buh-bah-buh-baah-baah”, falling to harmonies on the last wordless syllable while an electric guitar plays a downward-scale string bending riff that cascades into Gruff Rhys lead vocal, which also mirrors the initial acoustic guitar riff at the very beginning. All done within the first 19 seconds. It’s a very inviting and warming way to start things off, just sounds nice to the ears in general. Quality and melody abound. All of which carries on for the next three minutes.

Someone please write in and tell me I’m wrong, I’m not the biggest SFA follower and don’t want to make any rash statements on how they would write their songs – but I think this track – a bit like my thoughts on ‘The Placid Casual’, really – was a result of the music and arrangements coming first, with the lyrics being written afterward to fit. And not that the lyrics are bad or are rushed. They truly aren’t. It’s just that the lyrics, particularly in the verses, don’t link to each in other in any type of cohesive narrative, nor do they tell a sort of story from one verse to the next. They are incredibly pleasant to sing along to though. Really, the main message comes in the choruses where Rhys tells the listener that whatever you want to do, do it now and reap the consequences later. And also to be cool instead of acting like a fool. Which to me, is pretty sound advice. I also have a preference to the original mix of the track that was released on the album (below) rather than the remix that was released as the single and used in the music video (above). The former pushes Rhys’s vocals into the back, while the single version does the opposite and adds a few new elements here and there. Which one floats your boat?

#1044: Super Furry Animals – The Placid Casual

Leave a reply

I once took on a personal task to go through Super Furry Animals’ discography in 2014. Reading around on the net and seeing comments made by the public, I got the sense that out of the British rock movement going on in the ’90s – not necessarily Britpop, but the entire scene including Radiohead, Manic Street Preachers and those sort of outside bands who didn’t fit in with that specific – SFA had one of the most solid catalogues of records out of them. Guerrilla was an album of theirs that was already well-acquainted with. But I started with the ’96 debut Fuzzy Logic, makes sense. And followed up by listening to Radiator, the band’s sophomore effort that came out a year later. It begins with a minute-and-a-half instrumental, ‘Furryvision’, a proper scene-setter, like the opening music in a TV show that plays over an opening shot of the sun rising over a sleepy town. But then ‘The Placid Casual’ follows and the floodgates fully open.

After a slick drum roll, the track and the band introduce themselves with ringing guitar notes and noticeably high-in-the-mix crash cymbals. With the incredibly trebly atmosphere going on, that whole introduction is like a wall of sirens and general chaos, probably to really announce that this was where the album was really starting, as the first track representing a full band performance. ‘Pawprint marks leave a telltale sign/There’s a furry friend loose and committing a crime’ are the song’s opening lyrics, a personal favourite couplet of mine in any song, and inspirational enough that I want to say it provided the design idea for Radiator‘s album cover. What ‘the placid casual’ is or are is never defined in the song, but taking them together results in a close enough description of a person that is calm, relaxed and unconcerned. There’s a reference to the seizing of power in Sierra Leone by Valentine Strasser in the second verse for no specific reason. Really, what I think the song comes down to is announcing that the band were back with this new album. Singer Gruff Rhys takes the perspective of the listeners, who ask what to do now that they have been freed and led into salvation by the band’s return.

What ‘the placid casual’ is/are isn’t defined in the track. Looking up the two words though, they appear to describe something/someone that is ‘calm and peaceful, and relaxed and unconcerned’. Seemed that the phrase itself had a ring to it in the SFA camp, as the band chose it to be the name of their self set-up record label. After the final iteration of the chorus, the crash cymbals slam away amidst some freaky synthesizer work and the ascending keyboard bass line, coming to a sudden stop and giving way to the following track’s introduction. Just keeps the train rolling on with barely a moment’s peace. If anyone’s wondering how the rest of my discography quest went with Super Furry Animals, I didn’t actually complete it until 2018, when I went ahead and started again from scratch. My own verdict: whole albums weren’t really for me, but the individual tracks I thought were great were faaantastic. ‘Placid Casual’ stood clear as a personal highlight.