Musical Animals Overtake the Roxy

The lineup for last Monday’s concert at the Roxy was more Animal Planet than MTV, as pastoral electronicists Caribou and Welsh psychedelic goof-rockers Super Furry Animals stampeded the stage.

The bill was remarkable for its balance; Caribou has ridden a series of melodic electro-acoustic albums to critical darlingdom, while SFA have enjoyed considerable success in the U.K. over the past decade.

To veteran concertgoers, the chance to hear two world-class performances in one night might have seemed too good to be true. Unfortunately, it was: while Caribou’s star is still rising, SFA showed severe signs of age.

Caribou, consisting essentially of multi-instrumentalist Dan Snaith and whoever he decides to bring along, was first up. Strikingly professional, the group (a trio at this concert) wasted no time in jumping into this year’s excellent “The Milk of Human Kindness,” which provided a blueprint for extended improvisation.

Caribou has often been slapped with the “Intelligent Dance Music” (IDM) label, more justifiably for their Warp Records-killer debut as Manitoba than for Snaith’s more recent pastoral glitch. But instead of the timid knob-twiddling and reclusive laptopping characteristic of the genre, Caribou played like a real live band.

In fact, there were no computers in sight: the album’s dense programming was accurately reproduced with only keyboards, a guitar, and two drum sets. While in general a second drummer on stage means either a gimmick or an inability to keep rhythm, these performers actually put them to good use, creating some very heady interplay with the frequently dive-bombing synthesizers.

The group seemed intent on nothing less than a total sensory experience, decked out in blacklight-optimized garb and bombarding the audience with bizarre animations on the projection screen behind the stage. While these visuals added to the atmosphere, they really were not necessary; the music was doing the heavy lifting. At once melodic and thunderous, Caribou put on a mesmerizing stage show.

All the opener’s strengths only brought the Super Furry Animals’ weaknesses into sharper contrast. The group sounded flat and uninterested, a problem exacerbated by the choice of material, with several tracks from their recent sub-par LP “Love Kraft.” The opening salvo of songs all blended together into a morass of undistinguished low-key Beach Boys homage.

The Furries’ trademark has always been their eccentricities, but here the music seemed positively average, and the quirky presentation came across as more silly than innovative. While their previously preferred mode of entrance was an honest-to-God tank, this time around they showed a video of a golf cart ride before walking onto the stage; it seems like Wales’ most famous musical export has aged considerably.

That’s not to say that they didn’t try to put on a show. On the contrary, they were visually striking, between their matching iridescent green radiation-type suits and the ever-changing graphics on the projection screen.

The problem was that none of this really worked: the suits just made them look like firefighters, and the backdrop more often than not looked like a head shop’s screen saver. SFA haven’t lost their eccentricity altogether, but it doesn’t seem to be in good shape.

It seems impossible to define SFA without mentioning their nationality; they are unapologetically Welsh. (They have recorded a full LP in the Welsh language, their first names are Huw, Dafydd, Cian, Guto, and Gruff, etc.) Yet one would never have known based on the performance Monday. They simply played their hits and kept the talking to a minimum.

When they did decide to talk, it was mostly political grandstanding. It seems that as their music has gotten simpler over the years, so has their political rhetoric (for those of you who didn’t know, Bush is bad).

While Caribou took what could have been a very cold performance and enlivened it, SFA did the opposite, banishing one member to the back of the stage to work the laptop. All he had to do to start playing a song, it seemed, was to push a button, which came off as perilously close to cheating.

The performance improved somewhat as the show went on and the band loosened up. Acknowledgment of their more fruitful musical past came as they brought out 1996’s Steely Dan-sampling “The Man Don’t Give a Fuck”, a track that, in addition to being flat-out fun, still holds the record for most frequent usage of the “f” word (48) in a charting British single.

Their Welshness also came to light for a moment as lead singer Gruff Rhys held up a sign an audience member had printed, reading “Paid a malu” (vaguely translatable as “stop bullshitting,” but ambiguous in its intended recipient).

In a few moments like these, the SFA of old reappeared, but these were only occasional bright spots in an overwhelmingly mediocre performance. Credit the band for staying true to their shtick without concern for hipster opinion, but their current approach to music is simply too boring.

From a naturalistic perspective, the evening was hopeful if not fully satisfying. It confirmed the life cycle of one of the rarest breeds of mammal, the innovative indie success: creativity declines with age, but younger acts will always be there to pick up the torch.

—Staff Writer Eric L. Fritz can be reached at efritz@fas.harvard.edu