GRUFF RHYS
Candylion Rough
Trade
****
If music is a journey, then we'd like to know where Gruff Rhys has been recently (apart from holed up in a studio finishing the next Super Furry Animals album). Two years on from his first solo outing, it sounds as if the Furries' frontman has either fallen down a rabbit hole or headed for the hinterland - albeit one populated by hallucinogens along the way. While his solo debut Yr Atal Genhedlaeth never quite shook off the SFA sound, Candylion is a magical mystery tour that conjures up the surrealism of The Magic Roundabout and Ennio Morricone's landscapes, while allowing Rhys to explore various musical nooks. Just as Thom Yorke discovered with The Eraser, stepping outside your usual realm can have surprising results.
From the fantastic '70s TV theme intro, you know that Rhys - tongue planted firmly in cheek - has his sights set on playful experimentalism. Single Candylion burbles about "penguins, carnations, lemons and Dalmatians" and it's blissful sing-a-long pop. The pace and style throw up lots of surprises, even contradictions - a lazy mouth organ intro on The Court of King Arthur becomes a military march of guitars and cymbals; Lonesome Words is a frontier ballad with a breakneck speed and Rhys may be spouting Welsh on Gyrru Gyrru Gyrru but it sounds straight out of South America.
Part of the album was recorded in Rio de Janeiro, so a Latin vibe resurfaces on Con Carino and the Mariachi-led Cycle of Violence. Splice the rustic setting and trippy manifesto together and you get a hint of Sparklehorse, but this is sweeping, psychedelic pop with a mind of its own. Sinéad Gleeson
