The science of album titles is almost as obscure and confusing as an alchemic spell. Some records get the easy treatment; find the first single and slap that name on the record. Others get a more creative title that somehow applies to the record's theme--Elvis Costello's Imperial Bedroom comes to mind. Still others have off-the-wall titles that bear no relation to the album itself--what the hell is a "whitechocolatespaceegg" anyway?

When a title fits, it accents every moment of music on the record, adding extra layers of meaning. The new Super Furry Animals record is called Guerilla, and that title fits like a glove. There's a sense of attack throughout. It's consistently unexpected and intense; many moments on the record are the aural equivalent of a flea-bitten soldier dropping from jungle trees to destroy an enemy scout.

This band is just INSANE in the manic musical shifts they make from one song to the next. Guerilla opens with a somnambulic Indian trance-hop ditty, "Check It Out," only to slam straight forward into the breathless guitar-driven power pop of "Do or Die." Next it's some Lennonesque psychedelia in "The Turning Tide," and on to a full-on salsa assault (complete with swingin' horn riffs) for "Northern Lites." By track five, the sixties spy theme redux "Night Vision," you're aurally battered from the stylisitc shifts. It's not just a roller coaster ride; it's Space Mountain ten times faster than average while you're jacked up on crack cocaine.

And for all that crazy speed, for every moment that the record screeches to a silent halt only to explode again seconds later, for each style shift that feels like forcing a car from first to third without touching the breaks--most of the pieces fit. When SFA is at the top of their game, they pounce on each song and beat it into submission, cranking out some powerful pop music as they do so.

The best numbers on Guerilla are tightly woven tunes that showcase style and sound over lyrical substance. A number like "Fire In My Heart," with the chorus "I've got a fire in my heart for you/I've got a fire in my heart for you," doesn't maintain any illusions of great depth of intellectual meaning. But it starts out soft and desperate, with lead singer Gruff Rhys pleading his heart out with the backing of a lone acoustic guitar, and by the time it reaches its inevitable emotive key change and sweeping conclusion--think "If Paradise (Is Half As Nice) by the Amen Corner--you're too taken by the music and performance to even notice the words.

Guerilla does get a bit weak around the middle, where the songs lose their tight structure and the band goes for a looser electronica-inspired approach. I lose more patience for "Wherever I Lay My Phone" every time I hear it, with its constant repeated phrases and grating sing-song melody. In its best moments, the tremendous songwriting provides a stable ground from which the Super Furry Animals hyperlaunch into mad stratospheres of inspired pop insanity. Guerilla is just that--a crazed, obsessed soldier on constant assault who will drop from the trees in the jungles of your mind and bludgeon your senses in the best possible way.