A band on the verge of releasing their ninth album in 13 years must be having some sort of fun. And indeed, fun is the first thing you hear on Dark Days/Light Years: an album that proudly declares itself a ballad-free zone opens with the sound of blithe Welsh banter. That gives way to an inauspicious prog workout called Crazy Naked Girls, but thereafter things improve in ways only possible in the Furries’ creative micro-climate. It’s hard to think of another band who could come up with a pop song about the part that trams have to play in an “integrated transport” system — complete with German rapping by one of Franz Ferdinand.

The mood of stylistic shape-shifting gathers apace with the tender euphoria of Where Do You Wanna Go and the supercharged boogie of Inconvenience. When it finally ends, it does so as inauspiciously as it begins with a psych-by-numbers jam called Pric. And if a couple more clunkers surface in between beginning and end, it’s still an acceptable amount of rough to take on an album whose smooth features a Moroccan funk experiment entitled — why, of course — The Very Best of Neil Diamond.

(Rough Trade, TS £11.74)

www.timesselects.co.uk/music

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