Super Furry Animals, Brixton Academy

They're back! After a five year hiatus, arguably the finest band ever to come out of Wales, the outlandish, inscrutable but utterly charming Super Furry Animals will tour the UK this summer, and will be landing in London in early May, at Brixton's O₂ Academy.
The tour comes in support of the 15^th Anniversary re-release of their iconic Mwng, a mostly-acoustic album (led by the delightfully cheery Ysbeidiau Heulog) that not only showcased Super Furry Animals' songwriting talent quite apart from their usual technicolour, psychedelic production, but also won commendation in Parliament for its efforts to popularise the Welsh language, in which almost all the album was written and performed.
The product of 90s Cardiff and a shared history amongst the bands members of life on the South Wales techno scene, the Super Furries are a unique occurrence in history of British music. Gleefully irreverent without compromising on quality, Gruff Rhys and co have barely put a foot wrong in a career approaching three decades, and spanning nine studio albums, since bursting onto a crowded 90s scene with Fuzzy Logic (from which lead single Something 4 The Weekend remains the perfect example of what SFA are all about), an eclectic, shambolic swirl of psychedelic guitar and hints of Bowie. The album's front cover, naturally, was a photo montage of teenage shots of Howard Marks, aka Mr Nice, probably Wales' most famous drug smuggler.
Since that anarchic debut, the band have rarely put a foot wrong, which is more remarkable given the ground they've covered. They've ranged from rollicking, stomping Krautrock on Hermann Loves Pauline to the straight-up, soulful pop of Juxtaposed with U, by way of the steel drums and calypso of 1999's Northern Lites, and in every case the results are bizarre, charming and effortlessly cool.
This year's reunion comes after time apart spent on various solo projects, of which Gruff Rhys' Mercury-nominated Neon Neon is probably the best, and continues the delight in esoteria for which the Furries' idiosyncratic frontman is well-known – their two albums to date have recounted the tumultuous life of the founder of DeLorean cars (Stainless Style), while their second (Praxis Makes Perfect) told the story of Italian communist publisher and militant Giangiacomo Feltrinelli.
In a crowded era of reunions and deluxe Anniversary box-set re-issues, this is one we really have been waiting for. Wildly inventive, disarmingly smart and unfailingly unique, they've not only achieved what so few bands can claim to, in creating a sound that is utterly their own, but boldly and with charming fearlessness Super Furry Animals have re-invented that sound several times over, and never missed a beat.