Super Furry Animals are the best band in the world now and one of the best bands in the world ever. Like David Bowie and The Beatles they have an amazing ear for both pop hooks and weird and wonderful new sounds, and like David Bowie and The Beatles every song taken individually sounds different while taken as a whole their work has a unique and easily recognisable identity.

Currently touring to support album-of-the-year "Phantom Power", a record which carves itself like the Nazca lines into the synapses of your brain on the first listen, there isn't a moment in this set from the dreamy Beatlesesque harmonies of "Hello Sunshine" to the final yeti-costumed punk/techno freakout of "The Man Don't Give A Fuck" where the tightly packed crowd is not in the grip of something beautiful and marvellous.

So what were the highlights? Pretty much everything, "Golden Retriever" and "Hermann Loves Pauline" are perfect bubblegum pop of a kind that a thousand Max Martins couldn't clone, "Receptacle For The Respectable" is epic and "Piccolo Snare" is sinister, haunting and beautiful. Also of note is the increasing profile and quality of Cian's techno interludes. Another achievement to Super Furry Animals' credit is the way that they are able to seamlessly wed pop music which is even better than Take That and the Spice Girls combined to a political sentiment which puts them more in the company of Public Enemy. And if the intelligent and funny lyrics and animated backdrops don't get the message across ("war is bad, Britain and America are out of line over Iraq") then the repeating Bill Hicks sample "all politicians are liars and murderers" over a Blair and Bush video montage which introduces "The Man Don't Give A Fuck" surely nails their colours firmly to the mast.

The audience goes crazy and refuses to leave, clapping, shouting and stamping their feet after the band leave the stage for what seems like forever but they don't come back, perhaps not wanting to overdo it, perhaps offended by the cries of "you fucking taffs!" from the same morons who were pissing off the Black Rebel Motorcycle Club last month (if they were black instead of Welsh you wouldn't be calling them "fucking niggers" would you?)

Nevertheless, fifty years from now people will look back on the turn of the century and they will judge us. They will judge us on our apathy, our lust for instant gratification and our shameless raping of the past. Fortunately they will also judge us on this and for that we can be thankful. This is classic music which will fly the flag for our generation long into the future. -Ian Martin, Dec.11.04