No upfront information on this band, I'm going in completely cold. It's hard not to read that name and not think of furries. If you don't know what I mean, remain ignorant. You'll lead a much happier life.
"Alternate Route to Vulcan Street" is kind of a beautiful disaster. My best attempt to classify it would be to call it modern psychedelia. I can get behind the underlying progression, the heavy, slogging percussion, and the trippy vocals. I have trouble with all the overdubbed parts, particularly the scratchy strings which phase in and out throughout the song. Maybe they were just too loud in the mix.
"Sidewalk Serfer Girl" is just a disaster. At first the song goes back and forth between a twee acoustic jingle and a ferocious thrash riff, which is obnoxious, but if it built to something solid it wouldn't be so bad. But the subsequent verses are jumbled and noisy, more style than substance. The chorus for the most part is played straight, and shows that if Super Furry Animals would calm down on the over-producing they can be a decent alt rock band.
"Receptical For The Respectable" reminds me a bit of Elvis Costello for the first 2 minutes or so. After that it diverges into a crazy noisefest, eventually winding up with the lead vocalist growling into the microphone as if he were singing for Napalm Death. I don't get it. The first half of the song wasn't anything great, but it was, dare I say it, respectable enough. I can understand things delving a little bit into the weird, but it felt like a step too far for the song to end like that. Maybe I'm just a bit mad that it wasn't done particularly well.
"No Sympathy For Furry Animals" is for the most part a stupid acoustic western song in the vein of the verses to Bon Jovi's "Wanted Dead Or Alive". Eventually the band realizes they've been doing something normal and decent for too long and they start playing really fast and adding choppy synth effects. The song becomes a self-sampling video game techno track I guess as a big fuck-you to anyone who might have been enjoying the acoustic part.
My favorite track was probably "Presidential Suite" mostly because the accompanying brass section sounded so classic, like music I might have heard on a holiday special when I was a kid. It was also one of the few tracks not to diverge into electronic noise. Rings Around The World would have been a much better album if Super Furry Animals didn't try to be so weird and just played their songs like a normal band. They clearly know how to write a catchy melody, and they show a decent range of style. Maybe their live product, where they probably can't reproduce all that electronic shit is better.
In any case, I didn't hate Rings Around The World. I was just mildly annoyed by it. 2 stars.
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