Send "Suede " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Drownedinsound |
_01.06.2011.jpg) There was a joke I heard somewhere on Drowned in Sound last year referring to last year's Suede Best Of album stating 'There already is a best-of. It’s called Dog Man Star'. Pithy and intelligent; I laughed. But it isn’t true. Because although Dog Man Star arguably contains more individually brilliant moments, there is a serious case for referring to their 1993 debut as overall, being their most complete realisation. The album emerged into an era when British music had precious little identity. Cowered into trembling submission by grunge, too terrified to fully open the door to acid house, still attempting to reconcile the death of the overblown synth-pop era that had preceded it. And so, their debut album rose from the mist; not so much into daylight but into day-glo, wide-pupil fluorescence with a record drenched in individuality, bound with delicious confusion and crackling with sexual charge. The rest (as described wonderfully by John Harris in his excellent book The Last Party) is history: Blur, Elastica, Oasis, Britpop, overexposure, New Labour, Be Here Now, death. Somewhere in that whirl of celebrity and cocaine, Suede got lost. But time corrects the crossing out. For a debut, especially considering how out-of-place it was at the time of release, Suede - remastered here by the band, including Butler - is a staggeringly confident and forthright statement. It embraces complicated lyrical themes with maturity and genuine pathos, masking the darkness of the concepts with dense imagery and double-meaning without sacrificing any transparent musical premise or thrill. Despite this, it remains a remarkably bleak record at times, especially on the windswept film noir piers of ‘Sleeping Pills’, bedecked in the most beautiful trailing fronds of lead guitar, and the ethereal, trembling ‘She’s Not Dead’. It also contains moments of genuine threat, tension and fear; notably in the perverse promise of ‘So Young’ and the personality crisis of ‘Pantomime Horse’. Studded in between all this are the indie-disco gems: the glam-rock stomp of ‘Metal Mickey’ and the immortal incandescence of ‘Animal Nitrate’, Anderson’s voice almost cleaved in two by the hacking slashes of Butler’s overdriven guitar. Finishing with the heartbreakingly beautiful, perfectly understated conclusion of ‘The Next Life’, the entire record is a complex combination of emotions, thoughts and feelings into one intensely fuelled, yet perfectly coherent statement. It’s hardly surprising that Suede found such a niche among the wandering teenagers of early Nineties Britain: Suede is practically the teenage experience defined in album form....full text |
| Bbc |
| Feted as the ‘best new band in Britain’ before they’d even released a single, Suede must surely be the one band of the Britpop pack who had to endure the most fallout from press. Yet, they survived. A large amount of this was because their debut album actually did live up to the noise. Always in with the right crowd, Brett Anderson and Bernard Butler’s band had, by the time this had been released, put up with their rhythm guitarist, Justine Frischmann, running off with a rival’s lead singer, an inability to find a drummer and a whole shed load of comparisons to other acts. To be fair Suede does carry its influences on its sleeve, but this was 1993 and post-modernism was the flavour du jour anyway. Frischmann’s next band, Elastica, certainly aped both the Stranglers and Wire, and Oasis’ slavish devotion to the Pistols and Beatles didn’t stop them coining it. Suede’s main sources were Bowie (in Anderson’s wonderfully fey delivery) and the Smiths. Ironically, Mike Joyce of the Smiths was a member for a short spell, but their bleak chronicles of urban dysfunction, modern love and sexual confusion were never a million miles away from Morrissey’s home ground. Having said that, the band had enough chutzpah and originality to weather the comparisons with ease. Bernard Butler’s awesome technique was the ace in the pack. Propelling three-minute bursts of pop perfection like “Metal Mickey” and “The Drowners” into the singles charts, the bands’ sham-glam reeked of a new kind of decadence, laced with black humour. The key text here is “Animal Nitrate”. Despite its punning title it’s a thrill-seeking slice of cynicism that perfectly summed up what it was like to be young and chemically imbalanced in the nation’s capital at the time. This was a foreshadow of Blair’s Britain. The way it sold (the fastest selling album of all time and straight in at number one) showed that the public not only believed the hype; they wanted it. All wrapped in androgyny and attitude, Suede delivered everything that we’d hoped for and more. Their fortunes were never to be as good again....full text |
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_01.06.2011.jpg "Suede - Suede (reissue) review")
