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Super Furry Animals

"Hey Venus"

From eerie 1950s teen love gone awry to the early days of punk, "Hey Venus" covers nostalgia from one corner of American pop music to the next - which is interesting coming from Super Furry Animals, a Welsh band that has spent the past decade reinterpreting and redefining everything modern radio has had to offer.

What the band does well here, and what it has done well all along, is to bring any subtlety these genres had in their original incarnations right to the surface.

Instead of trying to make a sappy, sock-hop ballad (in a sort of "Leader of the Pack" tradition) sound romantic, this band makes them sound appropriately tragic - as on "Run Away," with lines like, "Run away, that's what I did today : Cry a little, lie a little, die just a little."

Super Furry Animals' deft ability to recreate - with as much irony and unbridled pop bliss as it feels necessary - has made it an easy group for rock and pop fans everywhere to admire.

Rating: ''''

- Margaret Hair, 4 Points

Times New Viking

"Rip It Off"

To catch anything Times New Viking is saying - honestly, to catch anything at all, including a tune - you have to listen carefully, beyond the low-recording-quality-produced distortion the band's put on every track of its Matador Records debut.

"Rip It Off" is a collection of brief, youthful thoughts in ultimate lo-fi, where the goal is more to create an atmosphere than to create memorable songs. There isn't much to it, and without full attention these short anthems blur together.

There are moments where Times New Viking is clearly conscious of what it's doing ("Let's do something that hasn't been done yet"). And those moments suggest a pop-minded defiance that is worth the extra effort to try and pin down.

Rating: '''

- Margaret Hair, 4 Points