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In song and sound bite alike, Super Furry Animals have never made a secret of their love for America. But so far, their affection has gone unrequited, like a foreign-exchange student’s crush on a head cheerleader. We like our imports easy to categorize, after all, and the Welsh band’s up-for-anything, down-for-whatever aesthetic doesn’t always translate, especially given their fondness for grand and confusing gestures. They’ve built a song around a recording of Paul McCartney chomping carrots and celery, penned a best-friends-forever ode to pet hamsters, and released a Welsh-language album (2000’s Mwng).

The band haven’t made it any easier for themselves with Phantom Power, which tempers the giddy IMAX ambition of 2001’s Rings Around the World with some art-house despair. It’s simultaneously joyous and joyless, all downloaded beats, downhearted lyrics (“Everything we knew has wasted away”), and down-the-hatch daring. “I need no guidance / Just your patience,” Gruff Rhys sings on“The Undefeated,” calm as a dead man walking. Then the song asks just how much patience you’re willing to give, as steel drums slow-dance with pedal steel, horns hoist up a holla-back chorus, and everything falls apart amid drum-machine gunfire. Elsewhere, the band reprogram decades of pop history for iPod shuffle-play, and styles from electronica to country rock fade in and out like an old man’s memory.

The gorgeous “Liberty Belle” tries to rub some of the tarnish off America’s shining-city-on-a-hill rep; it’s social commentary in the tradition of “Presidential Suite,” Rings’ ode to l’affaire Lewinsky. But even when they’re not weighing in on stateside current events, the spirit that motivates their mash-ups should be familiar—it’s democracy in action. Though the Furries can’t resist walking the high-concept high wire, they believe there’s a more perfect union to be formed from the melding of wildly disparate ideas.