Hotel Shampoo
Super Furry Animals frontman offers his third solo album, which opens byways back to the songcraft he so expertly mastered with his main band.
Welsh odd-pop whiz Gruff Rhys is notoriously difficult to pin down stylistically, and usually that works for him. Strapped to a sturdy band or collaborator like Super Furry Animals or Neon Neon, his roving eye for left-field electronics, breezy tropicalia, playful psych-rock, and freaky folk is a valuable asset. But…
Gruff Rhys' last album was a collaboration with an unknown Brazilian protest singer/instrumentalist named Tony Da Gatorra, who invented his own instrument, a peculiar combination of guitar and drum machine referred to as the "gatorra."
Super Furry Animal, sometime Danger Mouse, Gorillaz and Boom Bip collaborator, and newly minted movie director, Gruff Rhys is quite the renaissance man.
Hotel Shampoo neatly channeling all of Rhys’s wonderful eccentricities into an intelligent pop record.