Ultimately, isn’t everything just a number? the PR accompanying Sadness Sets Me Free points out that it’s the 25th album Gruff Rhys “has released in his 35-year career individually, collaboratively and as a member of various bands”, a landmark most artists reach let’s face it long after they have subsided into cabaret.
Since the release of it’s predecessor Seeking New Gods three years ago the Super Furry Animals excellent reissues program has continued, whilst the rest of the quintet became Das Koolies and released the absorbing DK.01. It would be disingenuous to suggest their frontman moves more glacially, but his latest offering is a step forward as opposed to a leap in the dark.
Laced with a familiar melancholy, the magnificient countryfied opener is as close to a mid-life crisis you suspect the avuncular Rhys will ever get. But there’s still the guilt of Bad Friend and even the revolutionary polemic of Cover Up The Cover Up – “Overthrow the monarchy/And private school system” to help take Sadness Sets Me Free to new places, even given the decades-long catalogue of before. Everything is a number, until you let the numbers mean nothing at all.
You can read a full review here.
The Voice Of Unreason 
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