Taking Sides: Radiohead Kid A vs. Super Furry Animals Guerrilla

Someone had to say it.

-- nicky lo-fi

See also: The Smiths

Er, that's what I'm like with SFA thought, to be honest.

Someone had to say it.

-- last post ever (...), March 7th, 2006.

I wholeheartedly agree.

Historical note: Terrorism, disease, and natural disasters all existed before 2001.

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Actually, no. Guerilla.

Yes. Guerilla.

I remember playing Kid A one time and thinking "I've heard this enough." That's not happened with G.

Yep. Guerilla it is.

since, like, ever

i kind of think it sounds prescient... but yes, as noted, these things all existed, basically, before october 2000.

Only if you don't honour traditional melodic songwriting skills(and if you don't you are wrong)

Geir, you are no AlexinNYC!

"Fire in my heart"! "Northern Lights"! That one you get if you rewindie!

Do or Die! Keep the goddammn customer trigger bluddy happy for chrissake!!!!

Because it is interesting. And if someone finds 'Guerrilla' boring, well...

'kid a', on the other hand, contains several excellent pop songs and some expert chillout music.

i give it 9/10, while guerilla probably only deserves 6/10.

(And I agree that OK Computer (and The Bends) is better than any record SFA have made.)

Phantom Power < Kid A < Every SFA record, yes including Mwng < OK Computer.

IIRC, we were ranking SFA albums on another thread and almost everybody (with maybe one or two exceptions) listed Guerrilla either first or last.

i actually listened to 'kid a' for the first time in a while last sunday, and i enjoyed it immensely. i think 'treefingers' is gorgeous - it's the type of song that super furry animals would ruin with their heavy-handedness and overly busy production.

"Some Things Come From Nothing"

And Mwng and Love Kraft are pretty low key on the whole "heavy handededness and overly busy production" thing.

To take a line from the Pitchfork review:

"The wistful keyboard hook of "Some Things" is the most achingly beautiful digital noise ever heard in a pop song-- think Radiohead mating with µ-Ziq."

They can do the "Treefingers" thing if they want to. That's not their thing. If you want further proof, listen to Cian Ciaran's '06 album, recorded under the name Acid Casuals.

Who gives a fuck about "Treefingers" when there are a zillion better ambient records out there?
You'll find that most Radiohead fans hate this track. Probably the most skipped track in their catalogue, right up there with "Fitter Happier". But being an Eno fan, I love love love it.

uh, no.

Ever hear Mwng? For Christ's sake, it's obvious a lot of the SFA detractors aren't familiar with the bulk of SFA's material. They've done subtle songs that are far, far away from being heavy-handed and having overly busy production. They're all over the map. I wish they'd do an album that mostly sounds like the last track off Mwng just to shut losers like you up.

One killer SFA album (that supposedly doesn't exist)?

The 'singles' album. Not many are. That one is.

i have heard 'mwng'. it is unremarkable, and contains nothing as good as 'treefingers'.

i may actually buy the acid casuals record, out of curiosity.

i have heard plenty of excellent ambient music, which i hold in similar regard to the excellent 'treefingers'. and i have also heard plenty of super furry animals material (seven albums' worth!) and remain unconvinced of their excellence. after listening to seven albums' worth of material by a band, and finding none of these records remarkable, i am inclined to blame the creators, rather than myself - particularly when they make music within a sphere that i am familiar with.

i may sound like i'm trolling, saying this, but i would cite "Some Things Come From Nothing" as a good example of the furries' *inabilty* to harness the appropriate lightness for such a song. it always sounded a tad graceless to me.

Why are SFA threads always so intractable like this??

But other than that, they have been breathtakingly consistent so far in their career.

But they just don't have that thing (depth of feeling mostly) that draws me to actually GIVE A SHIT like i mostly do about their inferior cousins, Radiohead!

It might be the vocals (not spectacularly ugly, but nearly always unsuitable & very limited in range) it might be the tone of the humour (I get stoned too sometimes, it's not always *that* funny in the cold light of day) it may definitely be the TOO-eclectic jack-of-all master-of-none dilettantism.

SFA vs. Beck is a much better, more appropriate TS really. I don't like him much either.

I think it's easy to see why SFA has such a rabid fanbase even if you're not a fan; they've done a relatively good job at commoditizing themselves. Their brand identity is clear and relatively narrow, their overall aesthetic highly unified, their members have cute names like Bunf and Guto.

I think the reason why Super Furry Animals have the fan base and thus the fanboys, like myself, is because they do take chances. Radiohead or the Flaming Lips seem to get more acclaim because they may or may not do it even better depending on where you stand. I love what the Furries have done because from Fuzzy Logic to Phantom Power every album was different and pretty damn good. Few bands in a ten-year span release so many albums that are that different in this modern era. Like Geir has said SFA have yet to release that one album that makes everyone talk, Radiohead have a least two, yet they have it in them see Radiator (so very close but not flat out astonishing) or the singles collection. I’m fed up as I wanted it on the last album but they put out something called Love Kraft (good at times but not up to SFA standards), and thus the only thing I don’t own by them, as I own 20 single (or all of them) and all the other albums.

This is ridiculous. SFA fans ... hell, NO band's fans walk around thinking "why hasn't our favourite band achieved the stature of _____ (insert name of lauded band here)?"

People are being more vocal than usual about SFA because this is a Take Sides thread and that's the whole point behind this thread's existence. And guess what, some people happen to prefer SFA to Radiohead and are giving their reasons why -- again, the point of the thread. This inferiority complex that you're ascribing to SFA's fans is in your imagination. Read one (1) TS thread and report back in the morning.

Radiohead aren't always that smooth either, and it's very easy to pick out influences but when they get it right they can sound like themselves and not many other other bands crammed together.

SFA hit that pastiche & collage button over & over again and leave me constantly annoyed. Gah! this thread.

Beck, Flaming Lips, Grandaddy. I agree that, musically, they don't have much in common with Radiohead. At least not Radiohead at their best (90s Radiohead that is)

SFA hit that pastiche & collage button over & over again and leave me constantly annoyed. Gah! this thread. "

I think SFA sound like themselves, personally. Maybe it's Gruff's voice, but I know when I'm hearing an SFA song. There's nothing out there that sounds like their genre-blending experiments, IMO. "Northern Lites," "Juxtapozed With U,"--I could go on--all sound like nothing else.

People are being more vocal than usual about SFA because this is a Take Sides thread and that's the whole point behind this thread's existence.

I wasn't referring specifically to this thread but to an overall behavior. I mean, if you visit any bulletin board devoted to any single band, you'll witness some of the most nauseous zealotry and myopic perspective ever. There's no reason for a TS thread to get so fanboyish. (Actually, I wasn't accusing this one of being so.)

I mean, what would compel a fan to write something like this? (And actually, I think that comparison is fairly OTM.) Surely there is some perceived conflict that they feel they have some stake in.

SFA as a band are a class bunch of people and completely unpretentious. Radiohead on the otherhand are not.

For the record, Guerrilla wins out over Kid A for me, but only by a slight margin. I appreciate the humor on G and the way it balances out the darker stuff. Kid A is humorless -- all dark stuff.

No clue myself, but if I had to draw a commonality in the two it'd be that both heavily subvert the primacy of the lead vocalist's voice in the pop/rock context. There are long stretches in both where voices are heavily treated and/or are used as texture. No other work in either's respective catalog does as much to (intentially) distance listeners from the vocalist.

Agreed! My first exposure to SFA had me thinking, "this guy sounds like Elvis Costello." But I think that was with "Demons"--I can't imagine having that reaction to "Juxtaposed With U," because of the vocoder-ized vocals, and because I wouldn't have expected Costello to do a song in that mode.

People compare Radiohead to Pink Floyd
The Super Furry Animals are never called "the new" anything! This is because they are the Super Furry Animals!! They sound like themselves.

Hmmmm.. So all those XTC comparisions I have heard are just in my imagination? :)

He wishes.

There's no conflict other than the fact that Radiohead are a "target" band for people trying to make a quality comparison, much like the way people always compare their favourite bands to the Beatles or the Velvets or whoever. Again, I don't think this specifically applies to SFA fans.

Geir already noted that the author of that page is living in a fanboy dreamland ... his "argument" is a little too enthusiastic. :)

However, the cover art comparison is OTM -- SFA are consistently excellent when it comes to cover art.

"The Turning Tide" from "Guerrilla" always reminds me of Pink Floyd.

Therefore, I'd say that the probability of you casually listening to songs from "Mwng" and not immediately noticing the difference between those songs and their English language stuff = 50%

-- enjoy bell woods (enjoybellwood...), March 9th, 2006.

I wish he was too.

Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood of Radiohead will be joined by Gruff Rhys (Super Furry Animals) and Kate Rusby:

* The place:
KOKO, London
* The date:
May 1st
* The cost:
£55 - all proceeds will go to Friends of the Earth.

Tickets go on sale from Saturday March 11th at midday via:

* Tel: 08701 633 400
* Web: Ticketmaster

maybe they should have a fight to the death instead

But their albums always look very much like SFA albums, just like Storm Thorgerson's design for Pink Floyd always looked like nothing else than Pink Floyd.

I just realized how much "Keep the Cosmic Trigger Happy" sounds like an electro-fied Roy Wood's Wizzard. It's kinda scary, actually.

I don't especially think of SFA and Radiohead as comparable. I compare SFA to Gorky's Zygotic Mynci, and they pale in that comparison. Gorky's got awfully narrow in their approach on their later albums, but Tatay, Bwyd Time, Barafundle, and Gorky 5. If you're wary of the more experimental parts, just get Barafundle. Truly some of the most beautiful songs of the time.

SFA's 'Fuzy Logic' is perfect through the first seven tracks, then gets drab and loses momentum. They never quite got that momentum back.

oops, meant to say that "Tatay, Bwyd Time, Barafundle, and Gorky 5 are all excellent."

I also think that the first seven tracks are perfect on "Fuzzy Logic", but that's enough to think about that record as the best of SFA. Though the tracks 8-12 are not bad either, just not perfect.

Uhm, well, I can't make the comparison.

I think that Gorky's and SFA are both great bands, though.

Gorky's kind of lost me with Sleep/Holiday, and Euros Childs's solo albums, with the exception of Bore Da, haven't been too good.

I wouldn't compare either band to the other. Gorky's was more freak folk (whatever that is), whereas SFA have always been more rock 'n roll.

Now, here's something!

"Wherever I Lay My Phone" > "Idioteque"
― takk takk, Monday, March 6, 2006

<3

Honestly I feel like takk takk created this thread just for me, they couldn't possibly have but i totally grew up in a parallell universe (or inner world) where Radiator and Guerrilla were the main event 'alternative' albums of that time.

I'm intrigued by Takk's comment that the two albums have more in common than it would seem at first. OKC seems like the obvious counterpart to Guerrilla, what with the aliens and all, but I'd be interested to hear what prompted this particular comparison.

idk, 'Some things come from nothing' actually *does* sound like Aphex twin ca. 1993? Uhh, there is a resonance in that they're mixture of 'classic' songwriting given adventurous arrangements and 'songwriting experiments' presented in varying stages of completion.

There's also a polarity in their approaches, like, listening to Kid A probably the thing I'm most conscious of is "editing": their selectivity, the volume of material and ideas rejected, left out and discarded- it feels as though they scrapped a lot more than they used. The restraint is suffocating. That actually suits Thom's lyrical approach, the dissociated thing he does, it's like they built a cocoon to withdraw into.

I say this b/c Guerrilla is pretty obviously a result of throwing absolutely anything at the wall to see what sticks.

The real beauty of Guerrilla if you ask me (which of course you didn't), is how it completely falls to pieces. I wrote a long post in one of the SFA threads about how it's like the Gremlins 2 of alternative rock albums, or maybe the Duck Soup, you know, they couldn't hold an album together. And also that while they undeniably upped the ante with this record, all the ambitious experimentation and innovation is in service of a "disposable" pop statement, that rather pointedly is not timeless and has no real depth. Which is probably why a lot of people don't rate it. Radiator is so loaded with this... Nostalgia. None of that here. It's a novelty record.

I def think it's an interesting comparison that reveals stuff about both records. The "adventurous" elements of Kid A are more architectural, like they tore the songs down and built them back up from the foundation. I don't think I ever realized how much of the digital tomfoolery on Guerrilla is relatively superficial by comparison.

that's a nice post about two albums i didn't think i ever wanted to hear anything about again lol

Thx, yeah it is probably v hard to have an original thought Kid A / probably best not to encourage me to post about Guerrilla

*about obv

I know nobody cares but I'm bumping this again to say Guerilla was def the more challenging album of the two. Like Kid A was allegedly so fucking obtuse, o noes! Where are the guitars? I mean honestly what did anyone expect?

Guerrilla was supposed to be the album that elevated SFA to Radiohead status, and we got Ice Hockey Hair! We got Northern Lites! It was like, yess, they are going to do this, for real!! And then we got the album and they said, gotcha! we are going to do songs like 'The Hamster Dance'! We are going to do Styx parodies! And (perhaps most frustratingly), we are going to conclude with straight up *Britpop*!! And we dare you to like this!

My very first, unsophisticated thought on hearing it: "this album sucks!" It certainly took some getting used to.

That decides it for me. Kid A is obviously the "better" album, but: team Guerilla.