A challenging sonic buffet from Das Koolies.
The Eden Project, Cornwall, 2004. As part of the scientific park’s summer gig series, L4E (before they were L4E) is in attendance to see Gallic dream poppers Air, but via a mischievous piece of scheduling, supporting them are the Super Furry Animals.
Preparing for the release of their generally laid-back album Phantom Power, the atmosphere is suitably relaxed until towards the end the Welsh rockers fire into The Man Don’t Give A Fuck, which halfway through morphs into a stunning fifteen-minute techno wig out that has the biodomes shaking. Making their way out, hours later the audience are still talking about it.
SFA’s roots were partially in the illegal North Wales rave scene of the early nineties, but with singer Gruff Rhys off doing his own thing the prospect of new material is seemingly remote for now. As such, remaining members Huw Bunford, Cian Ciarán, Dafydd Ieuan and Guto Pryce have formed Das Koolies, a project coming from a new status quo they describe as, ‘An abundance of ideas…New inventions and old friendships percolate, produce and persist…Come this way as a dead end is circumvented to show an open road’.
DK.01 stitches, warps and reworks material old and new, drawing inspiration from figures like British MC Killa Kela and classical composer Henry Purcell.
Recorded in the band’s facility in Cardiff, it’s a sprawling double album’s worth of material made free from the yoke of suit pleasing. Mind bending and yet hummable over breakfast, before entering you’d better strap yourself in.
Its first impression is of musicians who evidently feel there’s no time to waste. Potty mouthed opener Best Mindfuck Yet – embryonic versions of which were played during the MWNG tour in the mid-00s – pulses to a looped sample and then energises itself from a toolbox of abstract electronic sculpting, former Furry Rhys Ifans adding menacing incidental vox.
Epic? Well, yes, but the following Out Of This World solders two past worlds together even more explicitly. On the one hand a neo-classic pop tune of which they’ve made a ton of, Bunford’s sonic layering kicks in an ecstatic counter life, one that will encourage the throwing of middle aged, rubber-shaped-shapes all over the country.
Now’s where the sprawling bit – remember that? – comes in. There’s a lot to process here, a land where the Montezuma spans almost ten minutes, an Animal Collective-type folly that splices psychedelia, prog and IDM as a still oddly satisfying thrupple.
Dig though – we encourage it – and the effort brings reward in the form of Sorry Not Sorry’s exceptional sunshine alt. techno, Alligator’s shit-losing friendly skree and the erratic glory of closer Wired For Sound.
This juxtaposition between fun, frolic and fear is the album’s omnipresent quality. On Nuthin Sandwich the vista of an off-freeway America looms large in a drug-laden rearview mirror – the protagonists, ‘a shroom-munching father and son in matching tracksuits reaching a final destination of near-religious enlightenment’.
Elsewhere, A Ride tackles politics abstractly, the chinless chancers that continue to infest the country’s upper echelons rounded on with a parping, peeping ping-o-rama that would undoubtedly sound better coming out of a (decommissioned) tank.
Oh, and there’s almost not enough room to write about Katal, a hands-half-in-the-air anthem which manages to sound introspective and cosmic at the same time. Seriously.
You don’t have to been in Cornwall in the summer of 2004 to appreciate DK.01. On it Das Koolies have served up course after course of mind food and toe tapping fodder.
Bring a friend, you’ll want seconds and thirds.
