super furry animals

For all the attention Of Montreal has drawn to psychedelia, I question how much good they've done for the genre. So the arrival of Super Furry Animals' ninth album comes as a welcome entry to a musical style dominated by Kevin Drew's junk.

Titled Dark Days/Light Years, the latter half of the title seems more apt. The band conceived the album as a "ballad-free zone," and that it is. Honing in on its second decade, the fivesome grooves through 13 psychedelic-some even disco-esque-tracks. It's all so upbeat that it becomes hard to imagine the Cardiff-based quintet has any darkness in the days that went into making this album.

The instrumental parts of Dark Days are its strengths. The swirling guitars on the eight-minute "Cardiff in the Sun" provide the album's most beautiful moment. The band channels the town into music, transporting the listener onto British beaches with wavelike sounds. Opener "Crazy Naked Girls" is the perfect psychedelic track, a little goofy and sounding straight from an acid-inspired rock album.

Never a fan of Gruff Rhys' vocals, I could do without the singing. Rhys' mechanized-sounding voice, coupled with the album's hour-long exuberance, wears thin. Even the gimmick of Franz Ferdinand's Nick McCarthy rapping in German on lead single "Inaugural Trams" is not enough to distract from the more annoying vocal qualities of the record. Moreover, said single, one of the album's poppier tracks, feels like a psychedelic version of a Cyndi Lauper song-whether that's brilliant or horrifying is up to you to decide.

And maybe that's a good framework for psych-rock in general. Either way, Dark Days is a more bearable foray into the genre.