Super Furry Animals – The Roxy, Boston, 11/7/05
November 15th, 2005 by ptm
Last Monday, a mere four days after my foray to see Elbow, I got to take in another concert by a recent-fave band of mine: Super Furry Animals. I got their then-latest album, Rings Around The World, at the Tower Records on 4th Street in New York. I grew to really love it and went back and purchased all of their back catalog, mainly via used imports, since a few of the albums weren’t available here. Then, of course, once I had them they were all remastered and re-released in America with bonus tracks. Nuts.
Anyway, they are a bunch of crazy Welshmen who started as a techno group but their records truck in psychedilic rock with twisted (in different ways) lyrics and heavy influences from the Beatles and Bowie. So I’m way down. I flip back and forth between whether the aforementioned Rings or Radiator is their best album, but there’s quality stuff on all of them. And since I missed their tours twice in the last three years (including one show that was at The Somerville Theater, mere blocks from where I live now), I was pumped to see the show.
I went with my friend Erin, who had seen the band before in Madrid (where else?) but only knew one or two albums. She just graduated earlier this year and is at her first job as a paralegal (or something…something law firm related as she applies to law schools…I’m a really good friend who pays attention when people tell me things). At this job, she works crazy hours. I mean cuh-razy. Well, no, just crazy. But she was tired when we met up for the 8pm show. We hadn’t seen each other for a while, so we were catching up when the opening act, Caribou, came on stage. I’m not linking to any Caribou site because I didn’t like them at all. I feel that, in a different world, I could like them…it was mainly instrumental music with each of the three band members switching around to different instruments. And a lot of drums. A lot. It was very loud. If there were discernable tunes within the songs they played, I couldn’t hear them most of the time. And 2/3 of the band looked like assholes. Not a valid reason to dislike them, but here we are. For a while I thought I could focus on the crazy animations in the background to get me through their set, but then I grew to hate the crazy animations because of their association with the band. My brief text message review: “Caribou are Radiohead if Radiohead were awful.” So…I didn’t like them that much. But a lot of the lame hipsters in the crowd did, so good for them.
After their set, Erin and I caught up a bit more and bitched about things, as we do. Then the lights dimmed, the screen started showing images of a hand scratching on a turntable. The other hand of the DJ starts writing messages on the hand: “Thank you for coming” and “SFA welcome you to Boston.” It’s later revealed to be the hand of Gruff Rhys, the lead singer…well revealed in so far as I saw the writing on his hand while he was playing. There’s a brief montage, to the DJ’s beat, of Boston, presumably taken by the band as they came into town. There was also footage of them in giant green ponchos with neon running through them running around a park and jumping onto a golfcart. Which led to them coming on stage in said ponchos and kicking into the set.
Needless to say, these guys are a bunch of weirdos. In a great way. They wore their neon coats all night. The lead singer (Gruff Rhys) put on a space helmet (as pictured above from an earlier show) to sing Slow Life. During the bridge of Recepticle for the Respectable, he even brought out celery to chew on as percussion. (Fun sidenote: the celery that’s on the album version is chewed by Sir Paul.) At the rock-out end of said song, the guitarist and lead singer struck over-exaggerated hard rock poses. They were wacky, although in a much more low-key way than I would have expected. Based on listening to their music, I would have thought they’d be more energetic and jumping around on stage. But they were somewhat detached almost businesslike in demeanor…which didn’t take away from the actual music being played, but wasn’t quite what I was expecting.
There was a lot of material from the new album, which was hilarious in a way, because Erin said she hoped they’d play older stuff she knew. But, no, after the first two songs it was six new songs in a row, with just one album track (Run Christian Run) that she probably didn’t know thrown in for good measure. Apart from the opening two, I don’t think she knew a song until the encores. She also was grouchy because this really tall and lanky douche-y looking guy was standing right in front of her, and when she asked if she could slide in next to him to see, he said, “Oh I’ve let so many people in front of me, I can’t let any more by.” Which was a lie, because we had been there the whole time, since before the opening act, and he hadn’t done shit except slide further and further towards center stage, eventually blocking my friend’s line of sight. She got real cranky then and I think it affected her ability to enjoy the show. I made the decision to not let it affect mine. Again, I’m a great friend.
The encore really picked up steam. If I had made a list of the five songs I really wanted to hear, the two that were actually played were in the encore (Something For The Weekend and The Man Don’t Give a Fuck). For the latter, there were these images of politicians thumping podiums and speechifying, but turned into negatives and given a sort of heat-vision look. The Thatcher image they used as they jammed out the end of the song is still stuck in my brain. In…a good way?
Overall, the show was very good. It wasn’t quite transcendently great, although I may be unfairly comparing it to the Elbow show (since that had a lot of extenuating circumstances and I just like that band a little bit harder). My incorrect expectations of their demeanor and some of the context issues (opening act, Erin having a less than great time) may also have impacted my opinion. But I did really like the show, and I’m hoping they come around again. Certainly recommended.
The setlist, for any who may be interested:
International Language of Screaming / Hello Sunshine / Zoom! / Atomik Lust / The Horn / Ohio Heat / Run Christian Run / Frequency / Cloudberries / Ice Hockey Hair / Recepticle for the Respectable
Slow Life / Juxtapozed With U / Lazer Beam / (Drawing) Rings Around the World / Do or Die / Something for the Weekend / Calimero / The Man Don’t Give a Fuck
(Edit: even though no one cares about any of this, for the record the five songs I would have wanted: Is It The End Of The World?, Something For The Weekend, Hermann Loves Pauline, Demons and The Man… Two out of five ain’t bad, right?)
January 6th, 2006 at 10:56 am
[...] 6. Super Furry Animals – The Roxy, Boston – November 7, 2005 Finally seeing SFA in concert after just missing their last two tours was noteworthy enough. All the great tunes and rockouts were almost icing. If they had been more energetic, or if my expectations had been different, this would have ranked higher. Full review. [...]