Gruff Rhys - Babelsberg (2018) Hi-Res

The Super Furry Animals frontman has always been political, but he’s never sounded as spiteful as he does on this satirical portrait of the United States in 2018.

“God! Show me magic!” Gruff Rhys screamed on the first song of the first Super Furry Animals album, and 22 years later he’s still waiting patiently. Even as his band of psych-rock shapeshifters waded through all manner of global epidemics—pollution, war, technology overload, evangelicalism, and, um, vampire bats—he never lost his grace, sense of humor, or faith in the underdog. While the Furries have been on pause for much of the current decade, Rhys has continued juggling absurdity and profundity, albeit with a more delicate touch, as a solo artist. But the ceaseless stream of bad political news that flooded the past couple of years tested even this eternal optimist’s mettle. And when he wasn’t contemplating the doomsday clock, he had to keep an eye on the actual one: He recorded his new album, Babelsberg, in a Bristol studio that was set to be demolished for condo redevelopment.

On his previous solo effort, 2014’s American Interior, Rhys embarked on a musical road trip across the Midwest, retracing the footsteps of an 18th-century ancestor who ventured stateside in search of a mythic Welsh-speaking indigenous tribe. Babelsberg is another journey through the American landscape, but it forsakes speculative history to survey the nation’s current condition. Lyrically speaking, the album features some of the most sobering, spiteful songwriting of Rhys’ career, with little of his trademark whimsy to cut through the black-sky mood. If its omnipresent, string-swaddled arrangements (courtesy of the BBC National Orchestra of Wales) initially feel like a soothing antidote to the bleak subject matter, they also serve an equally provocative purpose.

After all, the plush, countrypolitan sound they create is evocative of the bygone America to which so many MAGA-hat ideologues desperately want to revert. With Babelsberg, Rhys effectively delivers that crowd a flaming pile of dog shit encased in a rhinestone-studded jewelry box. The messenger arrives in the form of “Frontier Man,” the kind of smooth, harmony-rich cowpoke serenade you could imagine raising the curtains at the Grand Ole Opry in 1968. But when Rhys croons, “On the frontier of delusion/I’m your foremost frontier man,” he invokes the all-American outlaw archetype less as a model of valor and independence than as an example of pigheaded persistence in the face of contrary evidence.