Dark Days / Light Years [Vinyl]

Super Furry Animals | Format: Vinyl

Product Details

• Vinyl (April 21, 2009)
• Number of Discs: 2
• Label: Rough Trade Us
• ASIN: B001T46UGY
• In-Print Editions: Audio CD  |  MP3 Download
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #239,936 in Music (See Top 100 in Music)

Track Listings

1. 'The very best of Neil Diamond¿

2. White socks/Flip Flops

3. Inaugural Trams

4. Sounds Familiar

5. Cardiff in the sun

6. Where do you wanna go?

7. LLiwiau LLachar

8. Mountain.

9. Moped eyes

10. Inconvenience

11. Crazy Naked Girls

12. Earth

13. Prick

Editorial Reviews

Rough Trade Records are delighted to announce that Super Furry Animals are currently hard at work on the 9th studio album in Cardiff. Currently with a tracklisting, but without a title, the band promise; "Musically it's based around riffs and grooves we've been playing around with over the last few years. We have enough now for a whole album so even though it's still very melodic we thought we could leave off the acoustic ballads for the time being. It's recognizable as a melodic SFA record, but is very focued musically as a cohesive album. And no country rock as Daf has developed a pedal steel phobia. Which has confined the great Nashvillian instrument along with the Saxophone to the banned instrument directive of the SFA board. There's only one slow number, which isn't slow at all." Longtime cohort Pete Fowler will combine with legendary Japanese artist Tanaami for the album artwork, which is sure to result in a feast for the eyes. Super Furry Animals have some more tricks up their sleeve which we will be announcing a little closer to the release date.
Double LP includes MP3 download.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars SFA still progressive!, April 23, 2009

By 

Nse Ette (Lagos, Nigeria) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Dark Days/Light Years (Audio CD)

Welsh group Super Furry Animals first caught my attention in 2001 with their brilliant hit single "Juxtaposed with you". Breezy and soulful, it sounded like nothing else on the album it came from ("Rings around the world"), but then again, most of what they do sounds different and striking. Their music has always been an acquired taste, and this CD, superb though it may be, is no different.

"Dark Days/Light Years", their ninth studio album is more of the same; swirling psychedelic aural pieces which are not too radio friendly and require lots of listening to get into. Case in point, the epic swirling trippy-sounding "Cardiff in the sun" (with endless "Sha la la"s), the cleverly titled "The very best of Neil Diamond" (a groovy piece with quivering guitar and sitar sounds, and muffled lyrics telling the tale of a post-apocalyptic world in which the lone sound is a stereo blaring Diamond's "Solitary Man"), the retro-groovy sung/whistled "Pric", "Inaugural trams" (which finds Franz Ferdinand guitarist Nick McCarthy rapping in German to a chugging Prog Rock backdrop), or the opening cut "Crazy naked girls" (with squiggly funky guitars) which sounds like "Purple Rain" circa Prince in parts. They sound so un-alike as to have been performed by different groups.

Other standouts include the groovy "Moped eyes", the sunny bouncy "Helium hearts", "White socks/Flip flops" (with a Keith Richards riff set to Motown-style beats), and the beach Boys-chanelling "Lliwiau Llachar".

This is a superb album, and it is great to see a group so far into their career still being creative and ground breaking. Brilliant!!

12 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Frustrating but hopeful., April 25, 2009

By 

Dingleberry (NM) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Dark Days/Light Years (Audio CD)

If your preferred SFA releases are, 'Rings Around The World', 'Phantom Power' and 'Lovecraft' this review may be of some use.

SFA's last record, 'Hey Venus' deviated somewhat from their previous three releases. Gone was most of the stunning technical wizardry and wild imagination in favor of more conventional song structures. Not a bad thing in itself, 'Ohio Heat' from, 'Lovecraft' was pretty straight forward but one of my favorites from that album.

'Dark Days / Light Years' is similar to, 'Hey Venus' in that guitars are more to the fore on most of the songs but it also sees a return of some of what I came to love about the three releases I referred to above.

I'm grateful to the band for streaming all the songs from, 'DD / LY' in their entirety on their Myspace page. After my disappointment with, 'Hey Venus' this gave a now cautious fan a chance to assess whether it was worth buying the CD or just downloading selected tracks.

In the end I downloaded four tracks - 'Moped Eyes', 'Helium Hearts', 'Pric' and the excellent, 'The Very Best Of Neil Diamond'.

The first track, 'Crazy Naked Girls' starts off promisingly and is quite addictive but then it changes course and heads off into prog-rock territory. 'Inaugural Trams' is also a great track but suffers due to a constant guitar drone running for the entire song that I found impossible to enjoy or ignore. 'Cardiff In The Sun' would have been better had it ended at five and a half minutes instead of going for more than eight minutes. As for the rest - many good ideas spoiled by repetition or unwelcome (at least to this listener's ears) guitar detours.

The last track, 'Pric' extends to the ten minute mark but essentially ends at six minutes with the last four minutes consisting of atmospheric, electronic noodling - pleasant but not as essential or radical as say the end of, 'No Sympathy' from, 'Rings Around The World'. As I love the first six minutes, I edited the WAV file down to 6.02 minutes using the freeware program, Audacity.

So, another mixed bag from SFA but something for fans of all their different styles. Maybe the next release will inch back a little further towards the heady (or is that head?) days of, 'Phantom Power'.

Pitchfork TV ( http://pitchfork.com/tv/ ) currently have a great forty eight minute film on their site of SFA in the studio performing and talking about some of 'DD / LY'. Gruff looks like he's constipated most of the time but he and the rest of the band sure are interesting guys.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Super Furry Animals - The Welsh Beatles, May 26, 2009

By 

Thomas J. Walsh "TW" (Massachusetts) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Dark Days/Light Years (Audio CD)

Well, another insanely interesting and sonically rewarding release from one of the world's finest bands, The Super Furry Animals. This release moves into a more drum, bass and guitar heavy dynamic, and it's the closest the band comes to laying down some crunching funk (albeit mixed with a heavy dose of psych freakouts). It moves from dreamy psychedelia, to crunching guitars, to gorgeous 60's Beach Boys pop, to krautrock. It's simply more brilliance from a band that is untainted by it's peers in the music business, and one that purely strives for sonic nirvana and creativity.

Folks - get to the know the Super Furry Animals. They are the best.