The south of France is nice this time of year. Then again, the south of France is nice any time of year – it is the south of France, after all. Maybe it’s the sea breeze off of the Mediterranean. Maybe it’s the comfort in knowing that Spain and Italy are a short jaunt in either direction. The people vacationing in this historically posh region have better things to do than get hung up on the details – not when choosing their next bottle of wine, not when deciding which 17th Century villa to whisk away to, and certainly not with the hustle and bustle of a hectic holiday shopping season. If being wealthy just eliminates concerns tied to not having money – the stress of traveling on a budget, checking bank-account balances – people in the south of France are carefree, not pinching any pennies…or euros.

Which explains Guto Pryce’s calm demeanor when Chicago Innerview gets the Super Furry Animal on the line in mid-January. The 35 year-old is back in Wales after having spent much of the past month avoiding Cardiff’s busy December while relaxing off the famous French coast. “Christmas in Cardiff [Wales] is crazy,” said Pryce. “People are running to the stores, buying 12 loafs of bread at once…being really pushy. It’s like, c’mon, the shops are only going to be closed for one day. There’s no reason to panic. So I had to get out of there this year. I couldn’t take the madness.”

As the shy one, Pryce isn’t for a boisterous onstage persona or show-stopping antics. If an experimental rock band can have a quiet member, he is it. The only Furry not known to grab a mic and belt out notes during a set, the somber bassist is content to lurk off to the side and riffle through his rolling parts with a surgeon’s precision. Yet, he’s also the closest thing to a heartthrob in this Welch quintet; his dark curly locks and squared jaw leave him looking a bit like Gaston from Disney’s Beauty and the Beast on his good days.

So his year-end getaway to a small French village is fitting for the passive rock star. It’s at least his second trip to the region during the past 12 months, and the first one turned out quite nicely for he and his mates. This return trip made sense.

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Hey Venus!, the Super Furry Animals’ new and eighth studio album, is a pop onslaught. The most forward release of the band’s decade-plus career, it barrels through 11 songs in slightly more than a half-hour. It’s a step back toward the streamlined from their past two records, Love Kraft and Phantom Power, which clock in at about an hour apiece. Even 2000’s Mwng, reportedly the largest-selling album sung entirely in their native Welsh language, almost doubled the length of the band’s current output.

If Hey Venus! is not the SFA’s best work, it’s not far off. Without losing any of the swirling trickery from those lengthier recordings, it reigns in the studio playtime and roots itself entirely in the glorious melodies that the band has utilized here and there for years. In doing so, the 5-piece sounds thicker than ever. Instead of relying on fuzzy structures and out-of-the-blue arrangements, the band opted for its most traditionally Brit-pop take on psychedelia. Although grouped with other festival regulars from the mid-’90s wave of Pulp, Blur and the like, the Super Furry Animals always have been an association more of geography than fidelity. Not anymore. Hey Venus! is rock in the spirit of Different Class and Parklife.

“We wanted to record things we could play as a band. This definitely is more of a pop record, and there was not a lot of room for experimenting,” Pryce said. “Plus, we were locked in a bit, we had nothing to do but play [while recording]. There were fewer distractions.” That is, if taking up residency in a studio/vineyard in the south of France isn’t a distraction. Because that’s exactly what the Super Furry Animals did in early 2007 while laying down the tracks for this Rough Trade debut. Nestled in the heart of wine country, Studio Miraval was the birthplace of The Cure’s Kiss me Kiss me Kiss me and The Cranberries’ Bury The Hatchet.

And much like another Miraval powerhouse, Pink Floyd’s The Wall, the tracks on Hey Venus! run together conceptually, a feat in itself given the brevity of the record. Yet the struggle of tying together an 11-song tale for today’s iTunes-savvy consumers wasn’t lost on the Welsh songwriters. “[Downloading single songs] fucks it up; you lose a bit of the concept — even if a record is a loose concept that you don’t even notice until afterward,” said Pryce. “I’m torn when it comes to downloading. I still buy albums on vinyl and like the album art and even the dodgy tracks. In the past, we had one or two songs with lots of experimentation and noise that fit in somewhere during 50 minutes of listening that might not work on their own. You might never hear those if you just look for one song.”

But the Furries never have been a band to avoid reinvention, and tackling the evolution of music distribution and the supposed elimination of concept records was just next in line. The January issuing of Hey Venus! will be the album’s third official release. Last June, the record was offered exclusively for download and then again on vinyl. Holding the CD version to correspond with the American tour was the brainchild of Rough Trade. After a year that saw Radiohead help redefine music sales to the tune of free downloads in October 2007 followed by in-store copies last month, the Super Furry Animals hope that their album’s physical release will be met with the same enthusiastic spirit as was In Rainbows.

* * *

Back in Wales, Pryce is preparing to embark on his band’s first U.S. tour in quite some time. With his recent vacation now a memory, the musician is again constructing his time like a jigsaw puzzle. Today, he has been up since 4 a.m. and already made the 3-hour trip to the U.S. Embassy to garner a work visa for his band’s upcoming trek to the States. Fitting in the pre-tour preparations, he’s fully engulfed in the frantic pace that his France trip was meant to avoid. But it’s nothing new in the life of a Super Furry Animal.

“The reason we give ourselves such tight restrictions to do things is that we rarely have a lot of free time,” Pryce said of his band’s recording and tour schedules. “So we do what we can, when we can.” The band’s cluttered schedules also means recording when they can, such as slotting in three weeks at Miraval a bit before they were ready. It’s this in-the-moment nature that has kept the Super Furry Animals in the forefront of British music since the band’s formation in 1993. It’s their knack for combining the freshness of whatever their current project is with an understanding of music’s history — something Pryce says the band was working towards doing even further, such as combining the culture of 1960s A- and B-sides with today’s internet market.

“I will also love full-lengths,” said Pryce. “But in a way, today’s society is liberating. Instead of releasing 12 songs once in a year, you can go to a studio and record a song in a day and get your record label to sell it immediately on the Web that night without having to wait for packaging. And you can do that once a month for the entire year. It’s the same amount of material, just packaged differently.”

Pryce didn’t imply that the Furries had any such plans, nor does his group’s track record hint that it might go the way of Irish power-poppers Ash, who said their 2007 LP would be the last in exchange only for singles in the future. But the Welsh ensemble never has been one for conformity, and after the promotional push for Hey Venus! the Furries certainly will need to find some time — and a place — to dream it all up again. And when they do, the south of France will be nice that time of year.

Chicago Innerview Magazine, February 2008