First time I heard this album, I was curled up in the back seat of my friend’s car coming back from a role playing convention in Cork. I was the only person in the car who’d been drinking the night before and I thought I was going to die. Picture me trying to get some sleep while my mate Paul thought it would be a good time to get evangelical about the Furries and play me Rings Around the World.
This was not a great idea. In my sorry state, I thought this was the worst album to ever be recorded and that it had been designed by Satan himself to make me suffer. This wasn’t my first time hearing SFA, I’d seen them supporting Blur and at Glastonbury but had never got round to checking them out. However, this wasn’t a great introduction to a band and not a memory I treasure.
A while later, Paul loaned me the DVD the band put out for the Rings album. One night, with the flat to myself and while slightly inebriated, I put it on and suddenly it clicked. The album’s sprawling genre blending finally made sense, and from then I was hooked and the Furries quickly became one of my favourite bands.
Musical necrophilia was easily one of the worst pop culture sins of the 90’s. Bands were ripping off 60’s and 70’s acts shamelessly while adding nothing new. SFA, although steeped in 60’s psychedelia, used it as a staging point for whatever cosmic ideas moved them. Techno, IDM, Metal, 80’s pop, all of it was all fair game for a band who seemed to wholeheartedly believe that staying in one musical lane is for losers. The lead singer, Gruff, has one of the best voices in music but the band’s not so secret weapon is that the other band members are just as talented and the vocal harmonies are rivalling the Beach Boys.
This is the second album to feature Paul McCartney eating celery. Which isn’t a lot but it’s weird that it happened twice. The fact that it’s happening on Receptacle for the Respectable, the heaviest song on the album, is very funny to me.
Rings stands out for its lyrics almost as much as its music. Gruff has a very unusual, surreal way of looking at the world. Lines like “as subtle as a nail bomb to the head” fly past name checks to 90’s Japanese Cyberpunk films and lamenting sheep that were never cloned.
With Rings, we have an album that you can clearly hear who it’s been influenced by, but still, somehow, manages to sound like no one else. You would never mistake this album for any other band. The band was on fire at this point and for me this is peak SFA. So much imagination, so musically adventurous and most of all, is as much fun as dressing as a Yeti and rocking out on stage.
What an album, there truly is nothing out there like it.
https://lynkify.in/album/rings-around-the-world-20th-anniversary-edition/eixi81cP
The ways of exile 