Cymru hither

>> From Wales with love, Super Furry Animals
talk the talk, but will soon fall silent

RARE BEASTS: Super Furry Animals

By LORRAINE CARPENTER

“We do get extremists here but we don’t have a language police,” says Cian Ciaran, reacting to local hubbub over antique beer signs in bars. “Common sense has gone out the window there, innit?”

The keyboardist for the Super Furry Animals knows of what he speaks, coming from a country where the native language was nearly wiped out by the industrial revolution. But Welsh has seen a resurgence since the ’80s, with increased visibility in the cities (due partly to the implementation of bilingual signs), rising standards of Welsh-language education and the relatively recent advent of Welsh TV.

“There was a lot of it on radio when I was growing up,” says Ciaran, “but I spoke both languages in the home mainly because my parents had learned Welsh. They were responsible for giving me my Welsh-language music lessons.”

Wales is now officially bilingual, with roughly 300,000 Welsh speakers in a population of just under three million, less than that of Montreal. The country is unlikely to adopt any Québécois policing strategies, but Ciaran feels that it’s no time for complacency in the preservation of the language.

Super Furry Animals have aided in popularizing their mother tongue since banding together in the mid-’90s, when Welsh didn’t exactly fly with most U.K. record companies. Their discography is scattered with Welsh songs, and one English-free album, 2000’s Mwng (“Mane”). Singer Gruff Rhys’s first solo album, 2005’s Yr Atal Genhedlaeth (“The Stuttering Generation”) was all-Welsh too, and his 2006 follow-up, Candylion, featured two Welsh songs (and one in “bad Spanish”). Rhys has also taken to compiling Welsh-language folk, psych and prog of the ’70s on a series of CDs called Welsh Rare Beat.

But the band that once wrote a song called “The International Language of Screaming” is as interested in global communication as they are in homestyle singing. The band’s current tour in support of their eighth album, Hey Venus!, may be their last for some time—fans can request their favourite songs for tonight’s show here: www.beggarsgroupusa.com/superfurrywidget/index.html —because, upon their return home, the Furries will pick up an ambitious project that sidesteps language altogether. Whereas Hey Venus! is a gift to lovers of classic pop, the next record will explore the realm of soundtracks: the quintet is collaborating with a classical conductor-arranger, and a number of additional players, for an entirely instrumental orchestral album.

Luckily, most of the work involved will be pre-production, so they’re not at risk of following their heroes the Beach Boys (Brian Wilson specifically) down the path of studio-bound derangement, and ending up in a Smile-style debacle.

“We’ve been lucky that it hasn’t been a struggle to get an album finished,” says Ciaran. “Studio-based work has always excited us, and it’s always been pleasurable. Every time we go in, we’re like kids in a toy shop playing with new tricks.

“So as long as we don’t go up our own asses, I’m happy to disappear into the studio for a while.”

With Times New Viking and
Jeffrey Lewis, at Cabaret
Juste pour rire on Thursday,
Feb. 21, 8 p.m., $20