Suede - "Suede" Vinyl, Reissue, Album, 2014/1993 (Demon Records)

As mentioned before on this blog, I have been avoiding Suede for 25 years.  Usually, when I do something like that, it's for a good reason.  I here now to admit I was wrong.  They're a terrific band with solid songs.  My problem with them is that they wear their influences quite loudly, and that got on my nerves.  25 years later I read lead singer Brett Anderson's rather remarkable childhood/teenage memoir which led me to re-listen to their catalog.  I'm slowly buying up their albums on vinyl, and it's an exciting listening experience. 

Suede's first album, simply called "Suede" is a homage to both Bowie and The Smiths.  Bernard Butler, the co-writer as well as their guitarist, is a mixture of Mick Ronson and Johnny Marr.  Incredibly skillful with the many-layered sounds of his strings, I'm often drawn to his playing over the music or anything else on this album.  The music is sensual with a JG Ballard/Bowie lyrical stance of wasted young people on the verge of death or some sort of life on the boundaries of a world gone wrong.  In other words, it's a romantic work.   Mat Osman and Simon Gilbert are a terrific rhythm section, but it's really the presence of Butler and Anderson that is the first stage of Suede.   Butler does remind me of Marr in a sense they are both music geeks.  There is a formula at work, in that most of the songs reach the chorus dreamily with the phrasing and echo of Anderson's vocals.  

Beside the Brit-Pop being full of good looking lads (and ladies), all the bands of that time don't sound the same.   If I had a gun to my head, I could see traces of Pulp and Suede sharing a certain sensibility, but Jarvis Cocker is a much more realist at looking at his world.  There is nothing romantic about Pulp which is a significant part of their appeal.  Also, I believe they may have been slightly older, so therefore more experienced in the relationship department.  Suede is very teenage angst, but also on a street level.   I look back at those times and hear this album as something new to me.  

Trans - "Green" Vinyl, EP, 33 1/3 RPM, 2014 (Rough Trade)

Trans is a band formed by Bernard Butler, of Suede fame, and John McKeown, who is or was in a group called The Yummy Fur.  Backed by the rhythm section Igor Volk and Paul Borchers, they remind me of Television, just due to the guitars of Butler and McKeown.  What I read of them is that they basically improvise, or jam, and then edit the recordings down, similar to Can's method of writing/making songs.   Also, there is very little information about Trans, because I suspect that the band rather have the music speak for itself, or just weary of the media/music promotion world.  Nevertheless, Trans is really good.

"Green" is minimal in a package, but cool design.  The music has a groove that is Can-like, but again, the guitars how they relate to each other is very Verlaine/Lloyd.   They made two EPs, with four songs each.  "Green" although improvised (in theory) is very melodic, and there is a hardcore guitar sound throughout the four songs.  Vocals are here, but it's the guitars that are forefront.  So if one has a need to hear Neil and classic Crazy Horse, or Can - and as mentioned Television, then Trans fit into that planet in a very organic manner. 

Suede - "Sci-Fi Lullabies" 3 x Vinyl, LP, Compilation, 2014/1997 (Demon Records)

Suede is a recent new love for me, and it is either because I'm becoming older, and therefore my ears are opening up, or I have bad taste.  I'll let my readers debate on that, but when I first heard Suede in the 1990s, I found them to be pretentious and too much of an imitation of various glam bands, and also, I suspected any group that was so good looking.   In other words, I criticize Suede for being too surface-like, when in fact my attitude toward them was precisely the same disease.  My thoughts on them were equally surface-like.  It was a happenstance series of moments when I purchased their third album "Coming Up," and reading Brett Anderson, their singers' moving memoir "Coal Black Mornings" at the same time.   Being a completist, I also purchase the three-LP vinyl discs compilation of their b-sides "Sci-Fi Lullabies." 

First of all, the opening song to this compilation "My Insatiable One" is classic.  Why it is not on their first album is a mystery to me.  Which comes to the fact, that all the b-sides are almost better than the final chosen songs for the first "Suede" album.  B-sides, by their nature, are usually throw-away songs, or little experiments on the tail end of a recording session.  Clearly Suede see their b-sides as important recordings.   A three album disc set seems obsessive, but "Sci-Fi Lullabies" is a very much release by these London artists.  For the music historian, Suede had two parts.  The first part is the Bernard Butler years, which didn't last long, but his importance is acutely felt in the first two albums, as well as a large handful of songs here.  Butler is not only the co-writer of the early Suede songs, along with Anderson, but also a magnificent guitarist.  He's a combination of Johnny Marr and Mick Ronson, and he serves Suede in the same manner as those two fantastic guitarists and arrangers.  When Butler left or got thrown out of Suede, one would think that's it.   Brett and company found another guitarist and co-writer, and an additional guitarist/keyboard player and they became even more popular.   What Butler brought to Suede is an orchestrated guitar sound that was textured and melodic, with a noisy tinge as well.   This guy is a musician's musician.  There is a nerdy, obsessive side to his playing that is very aggressive, but equally aware that he's part of the foursome (at the time).  

Anderson struck me as a lyricist who very much admires Bowie and JG Ballard.  With respect to Bowie, his "Man Who Sold The World" which strikes me as the framework for Suede, but I'm also amused and fascinated that Brett Anderson was listening to Robert Wyatt's "Rock Bottom" at the time of recording their first album.   Anderson is an 'observation' writer.   He has a good ear and language in describing a landscape in the U.K. that was lower class, yet had some vision of a future that is part science fiction, but based on the economic world of failure and misery.  Its songs are about youth, but not as bright young things, but more like the victims of their class and economic world.  It's romantic because the characters in the songs have no other choice.  It's either that or pure misery, which even with its romantic motif, is still a miserable existence.  Suede is the poets and voice for this underclass.

Once Butler left, he was replaced by Richard Oakes, who much admires the previous guitarist's work in Suede.   And on top of that, he is an excellent songwriter.  Him and Neil Codling, who happens to be the cousin to their drummer Simon Gilbert, is also a strong melodist. Mat Osman is also a very melodic bassist, and he adds a lot to their sound. The latter Suede is punchier and perhaps focused in their music.  There is not a significant difference between the two versions of the band, due I suspect to the vision of Anderson.   There is a Jacques Brel approach to the seedy world that he shares with the legend, and he takes on that role very well.  "Killing of a Flash Boy" and "Europe Is Our Playground" are such songs that are subjective, but has a journalistic skill in telling the narrative.   Suede is worth the effort to drop my objections and accept them for what they are: an outstanding band of great worth. 

Suede - "Coming Up" Vinyl, LP, Album, Reissue, 2014/1996 (Demon Records)

For two decades I had a mental block regarding the British band Suede.   I liked bits and pieces of their songs, but for some odd reason, I had a problem with their image.  All of it seemed borrowed from better sources.  Musically it had traces of Bowie/Bolan glam, but with Roxy Music imagery, due that they used the same visual people as Ferry & company, and when one is approached by this post-modern aspect of Suede, is it important?   On the plus side, I do like Brett Anderson's mannerist vocals as well as Bernard Butler's (and of course Richard Oakes') guitar sound.  Over time, I always found a song here and there, for instance, "Trash."   Again, when I hear that title I immediately think of the New York Dolls' "Trash," which of course within a few years later, Roxy Music came out with their song "Trash."  It's a good title, but surely Suede could have come up with a more original title?  Then again, I don't think Suede is really about originality.   That is actually their charm.

Suede's "Trash" is a fantastic chorus.  As I sit here writing this sentence, I want to get a lighter and wave it above my head.   It's a manifesto set to a melody, and that is something that Suede can do very well.  "Filmstar" is the ultimate glam beat, with again a glorious chorus.  In fact, their third album (and first with guitarist Oakes, as co-songwriter as well) is extremely catchy.  It took me 20 years, but I now appreciate Suede.   Anderson struck me as a writer focusing on the darker aspect of British living, and a guy who read too much JG Ballard, but that's me just being overly critical.  He's actually a very good observer type of lyricist.  An incredibly handsome man, with a good-looking band behind him, Suede is in its essence, a classic pop band that looks behind them as the past's projection, but also re-wiring the Bowie/T-Rex catalog for perhaps their generation.  

Blur and Pulp are the superior bands as album makers and songwriters, still, Suede has a strong presence between those two bands.  Both Pulp/Blur flirt with electronica and glam, but Suede brings a sense of glamour to the over-all British package.    It's like making a map and making sure all the routes are in place, and Suede very much needs to be on that map.  I'm not sure if they are a great band, but their love of the decadent imagery of the glam era, but done in their own fashion, is an important aesthetic.  There is a tad touch of The Smiths, with respect to their attention to the seedy-eyed imagery of the 1970s, but filtered through the 1990s Soho or East London world.  I'm very much interested in reading Anderson's memoir, that just came out in the U.K.  I suspect that it's a good read.  So now, Suede didn't change, but I changed.  I'm happy to be in their world.