"If you can't understand the lyrics to Mwng, the fourth album from UK's Super Furry Animals, there's a good reason: it's sung entirely in their native Welsh. "I had a bunch of songs that were musically and linguistically coherent and I think we make a better album by sticking to one language," guitarist Gruff Rhys explained in a press release. "It's not an explicitly political statement." Usually Rhys is eager to play up the socialist content of his vaguely malcontented songs, but for once he's understating the case: the medium is most certainly the message, and when the largest market for British pop is the United States, recording an album in a language understood by fewer than 600,000 people is tantamount to commercial suicide. By its very essence, Mwng ("Mane") is about as political as pop music gets.
Survival Sickness, the U.S. debut by Swedish garage rockers the (International) Noise Conspiracy, seems almost tame by comparison. Musically, it's the best rock 'n' roll record I've heard all year, a 40-minute eruption of punk rage, amped-up R & B, and 60s spy riffs that fells like a blast of fresh air in the stiffling cellar of American rap-rock. Its Marxist diatribes, largely inspired by the French theorist Guy Debord and printed beneath each song title in lieu of the actual lyrics, are equally bracing. Yet actions speak louder than words, and after self-releasing a string of seven-inch records (collected on the Canadian import The First Conspiracy), the (I)NC has bowed to commerce and licensed Survival Sickness to Epitaph, the closest thing punk rock has to a major label. (Epitaph has done some great work, but no one who's attended its cynical Vans Warped package tour would confuse it with a socialist collective.)
[more on Super Furry Animals and the Welsh-pk]
Sweden has never had to worry about ethnic tensions: its people have been speaking a common standard language for more than a century, and about 90 percent of them are Lutheran. During the world wars Sweden remained neutral, and while tensions between East and West were escalating in the late 50s, the Swedish legislature was enacting a compulsory pension for all employees. So when the (International) Noise Conspiracy demand worldwide revolution based on the principles of the Situationist Internationale, a French anarchist group from the 60s, you have to wonder whether their motivation is social injustice or sheer boredom.
Fortunately the brand of anarchy championed by their heroes the situationists consisted mostly of dadaist pranks and self-negation that was supposed to end in existential freedom but in practice usually led to paralysis. "The Subversive Sound," the second track on Survival Sickness, pounds along on a brutal three-chord garage riff, powered by singer Dennis Lyxzen's bristling vocal and Sara Almgren's cheesy organ. It's exhilarating, the kind of song that makes you want to hurl yourself around the room. But don't bother - in the liner notes, Lyxzen declares, "Music is nothing but [an] abstraction of an old and dull idea of bourgeois self-realization. . . . We get taught to believe that the emotions expressed in songs can be relived again and again by the artist and the audience, not realizing that when the song is written it is already dead, it is already a bleak and hollow representation of the process that made the piece appear in the first place." (Of course by this time we've already broken the seal on the CD.)
I'm more impressed by the stunt the band pulled last spring, when the individual members sneaked into China on tourist visas and performed more than a dozen shows at illegal rock clubs in Beijing, Guangzhou, Shanghai, and Hong Kong. That's the kind of international conspiracy the rock world could use more of, and in a sense it trumps the Super Furry Animals' gesture of Welsh nationalism. English may be the language of global capital, but it also allowed a band of Swedish punk rockers to carry the flame of individual expression to kids chafing under a cruel and rapacious government. And after all's said and done, no language means anything unless it's backed up by deeds."
Also - in case there are any Stereolab fans out there in LBO-talk land - the groop has put out a new EP titled The First of the Microbe Hunters which contains infectious songs with titles like "Outer Bongolia."
Peter