True story: Some years back, my parents, for no apparent reason, received a weather report from my grandfather.

“There’s a storm over Wales,” he told them, at which point my mother became confused. “How can there be a storm over whales?” she thought. “Can’t they just move out of the way?”

Point being: Wales is, to us statesiders, barely a blip on the radar, just something we fly over to get to Heathrow.

Shame, too. Glossing over its 15 centuries of rich history, I can say for certain that Wales has a killer flag (a medieval red dragon on a field of green and white), some wild soccer players (Craig Bellamy took a golf club to his own teammate last year), and really cool names — Gruff Rhys, for instance.

Rhys is frontman of the Super Furry Animals, a decade-old band of Cardiffians who will play at the 9:30 Club on Sunday.

Despite never quite making it to household-name status, the Furries have inspired a near-cultish devotion among their converts — largely on the strength of their lovable, impish sense of humor, which had been sorely lacking from the British charts. In the lead-up to Y2K, with Radiohead projecting millennial paranoia, Coldplay imitating Radiohead, and Travis whining about God knows what, SFA were writing tongue-in-cheek ditties with titles like “Ice Hockey Hair,” yelping nonsense like “Swell!” in run-ups to loud choruses, and generally keeping things lively with manic mid-song changeups.

Which is not to say that their music is without depth. For my money, 2001’s “Rings Around the World” is still one of the finest discs of the decade, a work that manages the difficult feat of updating lysergic late-’60s psychedelia without ever taking itself too seriously. It’s a record that pulls together roots-rock songwriting and spaced-out electronica and that drew more than one comparison to “Sgt. Pepper’s.”

So while SFA might not be able to boast of shifting as many units as some of their better-known peers from across the English border, they’re certainly just as capable when it’s time to rock a crowd. Wales, represent!