Radiator (Bonus CD)

Blue Cheer, Super Furry Animals | Format: Audio CD

Product Details

• Audio CD (April 12, 2005)
• Number of Discs: 2
• Label: Xl Recordings
• ASIN: B0007NMKBC
• In-Print Editions: Audio CD  |  MP3 Download
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (28 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #265,974 in Music (See Top 100 in Music)

Editorial Reviews

The Super Furries' eighth album finds the Welsh post-alt band in good stead with a following that only keeps multiplying exponentially with every release. This can be quite a dark album at times where angst, death, jihad can predominate but our heroes are sure to get us through. --This text refers to an alternate Audio CD edition.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars SFA - OK!, January 19, 2000

By 

Cary S. Whitt "Tune Junkie" (Columbus,Ohio USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Radiator (Audio CD)

How does this band do it? Listen to me on this, they are the MOST ORIGINAL band on the globe, period! There is no other band attemping to fuse the music that they do, and Radiator is just one more example. This CD, the bands second release, finds the band far more weird, but more substantial than their debut material. ( which is also fantastic ) Songs like "The Placid Casual", and "Moutain People", start off as really melodic pop numbers, but morph into techno-weird excursions in sound. The classic sing-a-long "Hermann Loves Pauline" demostrates their amazing lyrical diversity coupled with some great bouncy rock. All in all, every track is a classic, original and brilliant, and full of suprises. The world is a much stranger (and far better) place as long as these boys from Wales continue to make music.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Animal Crackers..., July 7, 2002

By 

R. Lister "burblet" (Palo Alto, CA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Radiator (Audio CD)

ah, the whacky world of the Super Furries. I always wonder how Gruff gets his inspiration for lyrics, apart from the obvious huge intake of spliff. For example, here, on Radiator we have:

the story of the leader of a military coup in Sierra Leone
a fictional account of Einstein's parent's relationship
a meditation on Puerto Rican vampire "goat suckers"

I mean, this isn't exactly Bush, is it? the surprising thing is, for all the whackiness, usually the first sign of an artistically-null band, the SFA produce great, catchy, imaginative rock - you'll find yourself singing happily about Einstein in the shower. Maybe it's the more conventional tracks that stand out: Demons, Gruff sounding like Bowie, is a stand-out pop song, but the mad experimentation produces a truely unique sound : The International Language of Screaming, for example, involved a fair bit of screaming - and a good tune to boot. Meanwhile, SFA aren't afraid to thrown a bit of techno styling and the occasional fragile downbeat ballad, giving the album something of a rollercoaster feel. If they didn't throw off great rock-pop tunes with a startling regularity, you might call this album inconsistent, but it's simply refusing to be pinned down and it's a hell of a lot of fun. "Radiator" is The SFA gaining confidence in their approach beyond their excellent debut, though the follow up, "Guerilla" is where things really took off.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars They know how to make you think., December 17, 2001

By 

darragh o'donoghue - See all my reviews

This review is from: Radiator (Audio CD)

This early Super Furries classic contains some of their best-known and best-loved songs: the darkly riffing glam pop of 'Demons'; the ambitious and bittersweet 'She's got spies', in which verse, chorus and bridge seem to be three completely different tracks, a magical mystery tour around the 60s scrapyard; and, perhaps their masterpiece, 'Hermann and Pauline', with its aching tinny keyboard melody breaking through the bouncing declamatory pop. Then there's 'Download' ('There are people who think and people who don't/ and the people who don't are the ones who have most'), with its weird descending and ascending piano scales; and the wistful Gram Parsons country of 'Mountain People', with its Morricone Western-guitar/ethereal vocals break and sudden invasion by a thudding spacestomp.

'Radiator' is so full of melodic invention and instrumental colour (including banjos, trumpets, sax, flutes, harpsichords, violins), so full of pop spirit and avant-garde adventure, so full of joy and sadness and everything in between, it seems thuggish to suggest that, as a whole, the different moods and songs don't quite mesh or satisfy. Maybe they're not supposed to. With this material, who cares?

The second CD is a ragbag of B-sides, bonus tracks and non-album singles that is even more experimental and inspired.