Last night a scruffy Gruff Rhys and his fellow Furry Animals hit the Ed Sullivan Theater’s stage with what has got to be one of the shortest (yet entirely awesome) performances Dave’s seen in awhile. Brevity aside, it’s pretty slick how SFA slip little time shifts into the mix on “Neo Consumer.” It’s 4/4 fist-pumping fare for the intro, but Gruff weaves some new subdivisions into the verse, and another fresh count in the hook, keeping things charging forward quickly — and sort of dizzily — throughout. All that and great taste in knit winter hats.
Hey Venus! is out now via Rough Trade.
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Mike Nesmith wants his hat back.
Got my tickets for the show in Seattle. Can’t wait!
so they changed up the meter? not that impressed really.
Can’t wait for Feb’s Boston show!!!
‘Hey Venus’ is an incredibly underwhelming album and I’m a staunch SFA fan. That being said, I’m still in their corner. The great far outweighs the mediocre and I’ll be catching them in NYC when they return next month.
Random thought – They should cover ELO’s ‘Out of the Blue’ record.
“It’s 4/4 fist-pumping fare for the intro, but Gruff weaves some new subdivisions into the verse, and another fresh count in the hook, keeping things charging forward quickly — and sort of dizzily — throughout.”
If you were actually talking to someone who said something like that, would you take him seriously? This brings nothing to the table. It’s like critiquing a painting based on the chemical composition of the damn watercolors.
I agree with John about Hey, Venus! being pretty underwhelming for SFA, but I said the same thing about their last album, so perhaps it’s a new trend.
At the risk of boring most of you, the switches out of 4/4 aren’t really anything special or, necessarily, even time changes at all. The drummer swings into what sounds like a 6/8 based groove for the second part of each verse section, but, if you were actually transcribing it to sheet music, you could technically still write it in 4/4 pretty easily and just emphasize different beats. It’s a very natural rhythm variation to fall into, given the general groove and the fact that if you count through the parts that sound oddly-metered, you’d still end up on the right beat when it transitions back to a basic 4/4.
That sounds terrible. People like this?
even lars ulrich could do that
All this talk of 4/4 has me dizzy! I thought I’d entered a critique on SUV’s… but that’s 4X4!
Less of the science more of the art! SFAOK!
I think they should write a soundtrack to a film which is about writing the soundtrack.
SFA best work was their Welsh language albums.