song "Presidential Suite". The Super Furry Animals had met Cale in Cardiff when they acted as his backing band for a song which appeared on the film Beautiful Mistake. They originally asked him to arrange strings for "Presidential Suite" but Cale turned them down reasoning that he would simply do what the band do: hum a melody to someone who could write the music down for him. Musical style Rings Around the World is "very cinematic" and falls somewhere between the Super Furry Animals' 1999 album, the "instantaneous, easy to grasp, and almost disposable" Guerrilla, and its "exact opposite", 2000's Mwng. The band combined the technology they used for the former with the simplicity of the latter, which featured "just the band playing in the studio". Singer Gruff Rhys has described the album as the band's "cosmic rock record". The album is a "kaleidoscopic blend of pop, prog, punk, psych, and electronica". Drowned in Sound describes it as similar to Guerrilla with "Beach Boys-esque psychedelic pop ... put to techno undertones" while the NME has called Rings Around the World an "expensive, glossy production ... lush and widescreen" and suggested that it "reaches for an effect so modern that at times it sounds like it could've been made in the '80s". The first single, "Juxtapozed with U", is reminiscent of both the Philadelphia soul music of the 1970s, and the "plastic" approximation of that music on David Bowie's 1975 album Young Americans, while "No Sympathy" has been described as the "missing link between Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young-scatted harmonies, jungle hi-hats and berserk sampler techno". The Dallas Observer compared "It's Not the End of the World?" to tunes such as The Kinks' "Waterloo Sunset", Dennis Wilson's "Forever" and Jack Bruce's "Theme for an Imaginary Western" while The Big Issue called "Sidewalk Serfer Girl" "surf-punk electro pop". Elsewhere on the album the eclectic range of sounds continues from the trip hop of "[A] Touch Sensitive" to the Status Quo-esque "(Drawing) Rings Around the World" and the "electro country rock" of "Run! Christian, Run!". The track "Receptacle For the Respectable" reflects the eclecticism of the album as it "undergoes a complete personality change" over the course of its four-minute thirty-two-second duration, veering from prog rock to death metal. The song begins as an acoustic guitar-driven pop song and then shifts into a slower bridge section which leads to an even slower coda