Drones and Dreams

The Furries' show opens with an imaginatively selected DJ set, broadcast live to the onstage screen from a digicam gazing down at Super Furry hands working two backstage turntables. "Police and Thieves" (the Junior Marvin version), "Mellow Yellow" and "Sidewalk Surfin'" are mixed with German hip-hop, bagpipe-led speed-garage and a great tune with the chorus "starrrr pilot." This kind of willful eclecticism can scan as hipper-than-thou, but it's perfectly representative of the Super Furries' inspirations and aims: They're gonna give you some riffs, some pop melodies and some noisy stuff from bonkersville; they're also gonna give you escapism, whimsy, real-world righteousness and utopian imagination. It's poptimistic music with an appetite for construction.

And a set with so many highlights. Post­Beach Boys songs buried in Jesus and Mary Chain­style guitar volume; the onscreen motions of a martial artist synched with the beats of "No Sympathy"'s techno section; a fantastic new song hymning the virtues of golden retrievers; and an impassioned take on the anthemic "The Man Don't Give a Fuck," intro'd with a recording of satirist Bill Hicks intoning "All governments are liars or murderers." For the lovely "Juxtapozed With U," singer Gruff Rhys alternates between vocoder, microphone and acoustic guitar, while blacklit laser-heat figures cavort around a rooftop pool on the screen above; and during the epic "Receptacle for the Respectable," a guitar tech with a John Lennon face mask tosses broccoli crowns into the audience before the song's death-metal denouement, in which the Super Furries are accompanied by footage of Black Sabbath performing live circa 1970.

The evening isn't nonstop genius, due as in '99 to the shortcomings of the venue. That is, ballads and midtempo rockers played 45 minutes into a show are difficult to endure when you have no chair to relax in, and El Rey's practice of charging $6 for a 12-ounce bottle of Heineken didn't really help. Still, you had to admit, it sure beat the heat. (Jay Babcock)