long with Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci, the Super Furries are often lumped into a non-existent Welsh music scene, the post-Oasis Britrock club, and as brethren of the sunshine-obsessed Elephant 6 collective.


In truth, like Gorky’s, they have little to do with any of the above. The E6 comparisons may be the most on the mark—the Super Furries have melody to spare and sprinkle liberal elements of the Beach Boys into their mix—but that’s a limiting comparison for one of the most consistently fascinating, shapeshifting bands of the past half dozen years.


Along with the off-the-mark comparisons, a common heritage, and an albatross of a name, another thing the Super Furries share with Gorky’s is a prolific nature and increasingly organic, sometimes even acoustic sound. Rings Around the World is the Super Furries’ fifth full-length to go with a B-sides collection, the non-album single, “The Man Don’t Give a Fuck,” and the “Ice Hockey Hair” EP. Over the course of that journey, the Super Furries;’ trip out of Welsh psychedelica has been the wide-screen version of Gorky’s, coming to you (literally) in 5.1 surround stereo sound.


Still crate digging and genre hopping, the Super Furries are lapping up musical history at all turns, drifting from the radio to the underground to the dancefloor and fusing the best of all worlds—in sound and song structure.


Many of the tracks could double as breakup songs. It’s not a lover that singer and chief songwriter Gruff Rhys bemoans, however, but the end of intimacy. In his eyes, indigenous culture and personality has been swapped for an intersection of globalization, unilateral U.S.-led foreign policy, and impersonal technology. Over Rhys’ shoulder the Caspian Sea is merging with Seoul Suburbia and Irish Lakes. It’s not the end of the world, but it’s the end of the world as he’s known it and it doesn’t suit him much. To the Super Furries, it’s a world in which a sexual dalliance can create a flapping butterfly’s wings worth of chaos or where individuality is a mere domain name.


Don’t care about politics? No problem. The band’s Leftist politics are neither overbearing nor omnipresent and they happen to be worked over improbably hummable melodies. The exception, “No Sympathy,” is perhaps unsurprisingly the weakest moment on the album.


Thankfully, the synergy-resisting Super Furries are hypocrites when it comes to the music, taking clutches from Gene Clark and techno, as well as the Beach Boys and Beatles. On the glorious “Receptacle for the Respectable”—the closest thing there has even been to a definitive Super Furries track—they skip though all four.


This is another chapter in the life of one of the most quickly, pleasantly unfolding rock bands in the world. Gleefully working outside of a scene or prototype, the Super Furries are dabbling in a world of musical influences and Western hegemony, playing the merry prankster to Radiohead’s gloom – and all with a smile, and in three-part harmony.