You can count on one finger the number of modern bands who have managed to balance brimming creativity vs commercial appeal over a decade. That finger denotes the Super Furry Animals. Which is why listening to a new Furries album is quite stressful. The people's champions of indie could seemingly do no wrong until the rather clunky seventh album Love Kraft, and two duffs in a row would have been heartbreaking. Such relief, then, to find Hey Venus is a fantastic album.

It turns out that evangelical lead single Show Your Hands was a pretty good indicator for this long player, in that both are instantly likeable. Also, take note that Rough Trade's Geoff Travis had asked SFA to 'make a pop album', which is a bit like asking Picasso to 'only paint in blue for a bit'. It has resulted in some bona fide SFA classics - Run Away has an obscenely addictive melody with 60s girl group production, the aforementioned Show Your Hands is blithely ignorant to our dreary summer and has you swaying like a grandparent, while the tinkling Carbon Dating evokes drifting off to sleep on an empty beach (sonically, if not lyrically).

I'm a strong believer that you can spot an album's slow burner early on, even if that contradicts the whole point of a slow burner. And the layered vocals of Gift That Keeps Giving promise as yet undiscovered pleasures (appropriate title, huh?), as does Into the Night, with its Fuzzy Logic guitars and hypnotic dulcimer sign-off.

One downside to Travis' request - or SFA's adherence to it - is the noticable absence of any envelope pushing, whether it be forays into techno or punky stompers. Compare it to 1997's Guerrilla, for example, with its nods to ambience, thrashy rock, calypso, drum and bass and even a straightforward ballad, and Hey Venus seems a wilful shackling of their creative powers. Perhaps this spells a new chapter in SFA's slow life, one where they segregate genres onto separate albums (they've been promising a techno-only album for years).

Either way, Hey Venus is a short, yet imagination-packed album that, when put aside Gruff's solo triumph Candylion, makes for one of the best years for the Furries since they entered our world.

4/5