Super Furry Animals - Hey Venus!
Hey Venus!, Super Furry Animals’ eighth album, is their shortest and quite possibly their most straightforward. Unlike the expansive, sometimes challenging, and significantly slowed-down Love Kraft, this album shows its hand quickly and works through a series of brief and relatively successful pop songs, summarizing everything that makes the Welsh band so great.
The first single, “Show Your Hand,” opens with a Beatlesque harpsichord line and expands into a fine piece of psych-pop, complete with strings and fuzzed-out guitars, followed up by “The Gift That Keeps Giving,” which sounds like it would’ve fit on any of the band’s nineties releases. “Suckers” and “Let The Wolves Howl At The Moon” are pretty typical slow Furries songs and the latter does a fine job closing the album.
What makes the album so frustrating, however, is the fact that it doesn’t show any progress or innovation from the band’s previous outings. It doesn’t make a cohesive statement and it lacks the sudden surprises and relentless experimentation of the rest of the band’s back catalog. It’s a good starting point, and consistent throughout, but from a band as creative as Super Furry Animals it’s hard not to want more.
C+
-Andrew Hall