Super Furry Animals: Phantom Power

By RUSSELL BAILLIE

(Herald rating: * * * *)

When Welsh rock stadium-fillers the Stereophonics breezed through town the other week, the question to have really annoyed them might have been: Yes, you've sold a lot but why aren't you as interesting as the Super Furry Animals?

They too hail from the land of the mysteriously missing vowels and have maintained outsider status in Britrock all the way through to this, their sixth album.

It's possibly their most approachable effort yet - even after the supposedly user-friendly but incohesive last one Rings Around the World - with the 14 songs keeping a dazed focus on lush psychedelic guitar pop that's big on dreamy harmonies, pedal steel guitar and lilting strings (best heard on Sex, War and Robots and The Piccolo Snare before it hit the button marked "techno overload" ).

It comes with a understated but amusing articulate political subtext (evident on the likes of the anti-American Liberty Belle and the Costello-meets-Beach Boys Father Father

1).

But it still finds an urge to rock on fuzzed-up thrillers (Out of Control, Valet Parking) in between many a ballad of gorgeously languid tune, while one brassy track (The Undefeated) sounds worryingly like the return of Dexy's Midnight Runners, er, complete with steel drums and machine-gun fire.

All round, a warped wonder.

Label: Epic