Paperjam

Hey Venus! by Super Furry Animals

Music // Jim // 18th September 2007

Two years ago I reviewed the Super Furry Animals last album, the marvellously laid-back Love Kraft. The review was a startling snapshot of my dreary life at the time. Like some kind of particularly difficult Ken Loach docudrama it was an account of listening to the album in a variety of situations including: Being kept awake by rowdy pimps, getting drunk on my own, completely failing to get my end away and going to Sainsburys to buy some bleach.

Of course, these days my life is very different (I go to Tesco for bleach) so rather than bring everyone down I thought that instead I will reverse things and try to discern exactly what activity would be perfectly soundtracked by each song on the ridiculously cool new SFA record Hey Venus!

The Gateway Song
43-second stomping introduction, in the most literal sense of the word.
Perfect soundtrack for…
Breaking the world record for the 400 metres, dressed in a sparkly shell suit and matching bingo visor.

Run Away
Big, cavernous, wall-of-sound epic of angry regret. The massive wailing chorus makes you want to laugh and cry all at the same time.
Perfect soundtrack for…
Speeding through the streets of Paris on a stolen motorbike in the pouring rain following the tragic denouement of a doomed romantic entanglement with the only daughter of a powerful mafia chieftain.

Show Your Hand
Unfeasibly pleasant and melodic single that came out a while ago. Definitely reminiscent of Hello Sunshine and Bleed Forever era SFA. Really rousing final run through of the chorus will make you sing along whether you want to or not.
Perfect soundtrack for…
A sunny day in the park with all of your best mates that seems like it goes on forever -sort of like in a Style Council video, but good.

The Gift That Keeps Giving
A song so smooth you could spread it on toast while also being catchier than nits in a Victorian workhouse. The whole thing chimes beautifully along in a way that says, “If this isn’t the Christmas number one, the universe really is as flawed as it often seems”
Perfect soundtrack for…
Snogging Angelina Jolie in front of a roaring fire while White Russian-flavoured snow falls outside, you flick her bra strap off with such deftness that it barely registers on an atomic level, she gasps, giggles and winks at you.

Neo Consumer
A jump back in time to the days of Fuzzy Logic for this tempo shifting rant which will no doubt have people jumping around in a frenzied, uncoordinated manner. Much as I did when they played it at the Godiva Festival.
Perfect soundtrack for…
Ram raiding high street banks and re-distributing all the money to the local nutters – who then crown you as their king and worship you as a living god of the socially shunned. They build you a throne using empty cans of tenants super, where you sit and survey your domain for the ten minutes before the armed response unit arrives.

Into The Night
Crunching guitars and the sort of noises that are probably usually at home on Turkish entries to the Eurovision Song Contest combine in a vaguely metal manner with some rapid fire lyrics.
Perfect soundtrack for…
Conducting a momentous pseudo-religious ritual involving thousands of Jonestown-esque devotees getting absolutely hammered on acid and dancing around a huge chocolate model in the shape of the houses of parliament – which is then smashed to pieces and eaten by the thoroughly twisted revellers.

Baby Ate My Eightball
Driving, layered effort, a bit of a filler compared to the rest of the album but still quite bouncy and containing reasonably unhinged goings on.
Perfect soundtrack for…
Throwing crazy, perhaps even dangerous shapes on an illuminated checkerboard dance floor somewhere on the 100th floor of a skyscraper in New York in 1983.

Carbon Dating
A short fairground-esque instrumental, gives way to a gorgeous, lilting waltz. Absolutely beautiful. Sob.
Perfect soundtrack for…
Finding yourself actually existing in the midst of that sequence in the middle of The Fisher King where all the commuters in Grand Central Station start dancing on their way to the trains.

Suckers!
Rallying cry against all the wankers that try to make our lives that little bit harder, sounds tired and a bit fed up but gets rousing with mention of phoenixes and big crashing bits towards the end.
Perfect soundtrack for…
Marching cheerfully towards certain death in the ultimate battle against the collective dark forces of unjust oppression, corporate self-interest and the wankers who came up with the Cillit Bang adverts.

Battersea Odyssey
Its all gone a bit 70’s here, this is a glam stomper that you can imagine being introduced by Noel Edmonds and the hairy fucking cornflake on Top Of The Pops in the days when they used to have dancers on doing overly interpretive dance numbers rather than videos.
Perfect soundtrack for…
Being the ghost of some dead, impoverished miner who gleefully haunts Baroness Thatcher with a spirit-worldly joie de vivre, making every one of her remaining nights a terrifying ordeal of bed-shitting fear.

Let The Wolves Howl At The Moon
Plaintive piano led country lament, which like every other song on this ace record gets straight into your head and squats there like a commune of particularly territorial crack addicts. Has a rather dodgy brass noise at the end, but not annoying enough to revoke the remarkably soothing effect that this song will have on you.
Perfect soundtrack for…
The sort of hangover that you get once every couple of years, the one where you feel sure that everything you said or did the night before had a questionable element to it leaving you not only dog rough, but strangely guilty. Someone very nice comes round, assures you that you were the height of alcoholic wit, makes you a sausage sarnie and several rounds of alka seltzer. You lie on your sofa feeling tired but reassured and at peace with the universe.