Mudslide devastates Guatemala. Earthquake pounds Kashmir. Hurricane razes New Orleans. Bird flu threatens the globe. Bombs detonate regularly. Gas prices skyrocket. Tom DeLay is arrested. A mobile phone ringtone tops the singles charts. Is the apocalypse finally upon us? Could we truly be living in the end of times? We weren't so sure, so we decided to ask keyboardist Cian Ciaran of the internationally eclectic soothsaying sages Super Furry Animals, who, in the course of their seven genre-defying experimental pop records have created a world all their own - while eerily alluding to unfolding real world cataclysms along the way.

Their 1995 debut single, the oddly named Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerych-wyndrobwllantysiliogogogochynygofod (in space) EP occupies the Guinness world record for longest title of a single ever. Their 1996 protest anthem "The Man Don't Give a Fuck" was the first top 40 hit to include the word "fuck" in it 52 times. The group released an album sung entirely in their native Welsh language, Mwng (2000), which became the biggest-selling Welsh-language album of all time and was cited on the floor of Parliament.

Yet the Furries have spent their career at odds with greedy war-mongering politicians, taking on the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal, writing about TV idols being sent to Guantanamo Bay and wishing to be abducted by aliens so they could be taken to a world where love is more readily apparent. Their latest record, Love Kraft (XL Recordings/Beggars Group), continues on this theme - opening with a 7-minute end-of-the-world opus in which the chorus "kiss me with apocalypse" melts into a 100-piece Catalan chorus. The band once brought on Sir Paul McCartney (for the song "Receptacle for the Respectable" from 2001's Rings Around the World) not to sing or play guitar, but to chomp carrots and bits of celery in the background. And the Furries toured the globe in now-legendary but currently-retired Yeti costumes. If that doesn't qualify a person to answer our pointed inquiries pertaining to the end of times and its relationship to the foreboding global events of today, we don't know what does.

Four years ago, Super Furry Animals released a song called "It's Not the End of the World." When Chicago Innerview finally got ahold of Ciaran as the band navigated London's Heathrow Airport one hour before their plane departed for Japan, I only wanted to know one thing:

CI: In the four years since you released 'It's Not the End of the World,' does it surprise you that the world has not ended?
Cian Ciaran: It's incredible.the way that nature is having a go as well, you know. Mother Nature's trying to tell us something. But, still, it's not too late.

With Cian acting all coy and playing it cool, I decided to consult Love Kraft (named in part after the German word "kraft" meaning "power") for clues pertaining to the band's mystical powers of prognostication. Flipping through the liner notes, I discovered the lyrics to the song "Psyclone!", a groovy little number that not only hints at Hurricane Katrina with the chorus "I feel a psyclone coming on", but immediately follows that up with the line "Count your chicken/We are taking over." The song serves up repeated references to chickens, all sewn into a theme of imminent destruction. This could only mean one thing: Yes, that's right, bird flu.

CI: Looking back to the song's genesis, did one of you have a premonition about the pending catastrophic aviary flu pandemic and this song came out of it?
CC: [Bird flu has] just reached the outskirts of Europe now. Romania, Eastern Europe, Turkey. I reckon it will spread to the U.K. by this winter. But, yeah, if you look hard enough, you can find things to support your arguments. But we're not that contrived. We like to let people think, to be aware, but we don't want to preach. We are musicians, foremost - well, we try and be, anyway. So that just happened by coincidence. We don't plan these things.

Maybe so, but at times it seems as though Cian, vocalist Gruff Rhys and the rest of the Super Furry Animals represent our modern-day Cassandras - armed with guitar, synths and a vicious sense of prescience, portending the plight of humanity one song at a time. Perhaps a look back will offer more clues of their Furry foreshadowing.

2001: A Furry Odyssey

It's autumn in the Czech Republic and I find myself twenty kilometers outside Prague, where I am teaching English. With my first day of lessons behind me, I yawn, stretch, shag the leg of my Northern Irish flatmate and settle in for a relaxing Tuesday morning of dumplings, absinthe, and Gambrinus beer. We consult the television console before heading to class, tuning to the German-language music station, Viva Zwei. We come across something that looks as though the Predator has directed it. An infrared heat sensor lens captures the action; warm and cool zones are represented by their accordant colors. There are figures dancing on a rooftop, oblivious. A helicopter crashes into them. The video ends. We change the channel to CNN.

One tower on fire, one tower has fallen.

The video was "Juxtaposed With U" from Rings Around the World, the group's politically-charged Stateside breakthrough record which was accompanied by an epic widescreen DVD featuring film shorts for every song on the record.

Cian is a bit reticent about a 9/11 connection, simply owing it all (again) to coincidence. He says the band didn't receive as much flak as Primal Scream got for their prescient 2001 tune "Bomb the Pentagon." He also says the band just didn't have time to edit the ending of the video. Even so, we never saw its likes on Viva Zwei again that autumn.

2005: The Bizarre Conclusion

Back in Chicago, I start getting into Love Kraft (which was recorded in Spain and mixed in Brazil) more heavily and notice an abundance of well-placed instrumentals, such as entirely instrumental "Oi Frango." The tune sounds like Blur's "Coffee & TV" on Valium, which is to say it sounds like Graham Coxon's "Bittersweet Bundle of Misery" on cocaine, only with Coxon's mouth duct taped shut in each case. Needless to say, it's a sound not of this world - and one that merits additional interrogation of Cian.

CI: Brazil or Spain? Where did this [song] come from?
CC: Brazil. 'Oi frango' is 'chicken' in Portuguese.

CI: Chicken? Like the bird?
CC: Yeah.

CI: The Colonel's staple menu item?
CC: Er, mm-hmm...

And that is when the realization hits him. Cian starts to laugh, cascading guffaws of dread. I can read his mind as he thinks, "Christ, first 'Juxtaposed With U' heralds Sept. 11, then 'Psyclone!' predicts Hurricane Katrina, and now we're gonna be known as the band that soundtracked the bird flu."

"Shit, maybe there is some seer here and we don't know it," Cian finally admits.

While the Super Furry Animals may or may not be involved in prognosticating global calamities or orchestrating the end of humanity, their lushly inventive music, their strangely harmonious outlook on life and their eclectic live show (Yeti costumes or not) is enough to make me, for one, long to be abducted by aliens and carried away to their furry dreamlike world. And I'm guessing I'm not the only one...

Super Furry Animals :: with Caribou :: Metro :: November 20.

Listen to an mp3 of SUPER FURRY ANIMALS' "Liberty Belle" courtesy of Better Propaganda