It's easy to not take Brit-rock quartet Supergrass seriously on their fourth album, Life on Other Planets: Scattered
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throughout the rest of the disc are chirping birds, bleating sheep, Munchkin choirs, fumbled tambourines and an Elvis imitator. As a matter of fact, American listeners have succeeded in not taking Supergrass seriously since they debuted eight years ago -- or, even worse, haven't paid any attention at all.
Underestimate them at your peril. Supergrass are among the best of a long line of U.K. eccentrics -- stretching from the Kinks to Robyn Hitchcock to the Beta Band -- who make rock music giddy enough to entice the easily bored and preoccupy headphone obsessives for hours. In the glory days of the mid-Nineties Brit-pop explosion, these youths from Oxford first brought their pumped-up, punked-out take on that tradition of eccentricity with a hyper debut single, "Caught by the Fuzz."
On Life on Other Planets, Supergrass are still chasing the promise of that 1994 fire-starter, and this time they nearly fulfill it. The quartet's appeal lies in its ability to sound rambunctious and just a little ramshackle without stinting on craft. The songs rarely seem overly meticulous or fussy -- even though they were almost definitely meticulously fussed over. And Life on Other Planets lasts only forty-one minutes, the dozen songs packed to bursting with the tension of too many ideas and too little time.
Supergrass combine a taste for Seventies rock (glam, Paul McCartney, Electric Light Orchestra) with the punk holy trinity of speed, noise and more speed. On "Za," they bang a gong as if they were channeling the late glam imp Marc Bolan, and then rev up from a swagger to a sprint on "Rush Hour Soul." The album's first great moment hits during the song's coda, an extended drone disrupted by a guitar riff dressed in T. Rex drag.
The album's sequencing is one of its central strengths: Just as things start to sag nine songs in, the wavy guitars and jabbering piano of "Grace" arrive, along with a shout-from-the-rooftops chorus. "Run" provides an excellent exit strategy -- it's an extended piece of dream-pop with undulating waves of keyboards and blissed-out harmonies that fade to silence, only to return - an endless loop of burbling synthesizers that echoes the album's opening seconds.
Life doesn't quite add up to a classic: "Prophet 15" couldn't be more derivative of Paul McCartney's "Let 'Em In" if it applied for a Wings fan-club membership, and the wooden ska of "Brecon Beacons" and the faux hillbilly swing of "Evening of the Day" suggest a band trying on uniforms that don't quite fit. "Never Done Nothing Like That Before" compresses pummeling piano and overtax
