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Not even the members of Neon Neon expected a second album. "I don't know about making another... it was quite a specific record," one half of the band, Gruff Rhys, said after teaming up with LA beatmaker Boom Bip for 2008's Stainless Style, a 1980s-influenced electronic-hip hop concept album based on the life of car engineer and playboy John DeLorean.
Specific, certainly, but it worked a charm, and the LPs commercial success along with its 2008 Mercury Music Prize nomination has presumably helped ensure a follow up five years later.
They've this time chosen 1960s Italian political activist and publisher Giangiacomo Feltrinelli as the central subject for Praxis Makes Perfect, but that difference aside, their second album continues more or less where the best bits of its predecessor left off. So the successful 80s' synth-pop blueprint remains, only this time with added motorik krautrock rhythms and no hip-hop cameos - recent single 'Mid Century Modern Nightmare' a typical example.
The whole LP is basically a short, sharp history lesson set to poppy Italo Disco, taking in Feltrinelli's struggles to publish Boris Pasternak's classic novel Doctor Zhivago in Russia ('Doctor Zhivago'), his relationship with Fidel Castro (the excellent 'Hoops with Fidel') and ending with his mysterious death in 1972 ('Ciao Feltrinelli').
Praxis Makes Perfect – as with almost everything else the Super Furry Animals’ frontman puts his name to – is smart, strange and witty, yet unpretentious, funny and accessible. It also has a pun in the title and, at 30-odd minutes long, certainly doesn't outstay its welcome. In a word: fantastic.
