Super Furry Animals
Phantom Power
WITH THEIR silly name and sunny harmonies, Super Furry Animals are a strange band to bear apocalyptic tidings. But strip away the whimsical veneer of such songs as Liberty Belle and Slow Life, and the imagery on Phantom Power is almost as sombre as a Radiohead album. “Have you ever seen the sea/ Painted red by a bleeding army?” sings Gruff Rhys in The Piccolo Snare. Thankfully, the message is couched in beguiling melodies and delivered with open-hearted warmth. On Sex, War and Robots and Hello Sunshine they even seem to be turning into the Flaming Lips.
Jane’s Addiction
Strays (Capitol)
THIS BAND was ahead of the field in the mid-1980s when it reinvented alternative American rock, but now it’s marching one step behind many of the acts it inspired in the first place. Strays starts brilliantly with the monster riffing and Darwinian theorising of True Nature. But the album fails to sustain this level of imagination. Singer Perry Farrell comes on like a low-rent Robert Plant on Price I Pay, while Wrong Girl reclaims that funk-punk groove the band lent to the Red Hot Chili Peppers. It’s still good stuff but, not surprisingly, they have surrendered the pioneering initiative.
Soledad Brothers
Voice of Treason (Loog)
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THE DETROIT band have been doing their bit for the past five years to kick-start the new American blues boom. The trio’s third studio album is a fervent trawl through the sort of influences — John Lee Hooker, Jagger/Richards — that would have had the taste police shouting “pub rock” not so long ago. “Well I woke up this morning and fell down to my knees,” Johnny Walker sings on Lowdown Streamline, before breaking off for a lonesome harmonica wail, while drummer Ben Swank beats out a 12-bar, train-time snare shuffle. Time goes by, but the fundamentalists still apply.
Jeff Beck
Jeff (Epic)
HAVING MADE some of the most sublime and sophisticated guitar music in the history of rock, Jeff Beck has latterly got hold of the idea that if he slaps down a Prodigy/Chemical Brothers-type rhythm track and simply blasts away on top of it, then he will sound modern. The approach is summed up by the appropriately titled So What. Flashes of his former brilliance can be heard on the more melodically alert Seasons, and the Robert Plant vocal sample lends an interesting frisson to Grease Monkey. But the girly sloganeering plastered on to Pork-U-Pine and elsewhere is unbelievably naff.
Robert Cray
Time Will Tell (Sanctuary)
I AS HE approaches his 50th birthday, Robert Cray remains the most talented bluesman of his generation. There is plentiful evidence of yet more creative progress here. The use of strings and sitar on Up in the Sky is a first, and the veiled political commentary on Survivor and Distant Shore (“War begat war/ All on a distant shore”) is a timely departure from his usual tales of romantic despair. Cray’s “problem” is that he makes excellence sound run-of-the-mill. His guitar solos are mini-masterclasses, his singing a sweet soul sensation, but the inner man remains a strangely closed book.
DAVID SINCLAIR