bloodsports promo and reviews

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Re: bloodsports promo and reviews

Post by sunshine »

16 March 2013
The Times
Suede - Bloodsports
Joe Clay
4/5
New records rule, but reunions for gigs are shit," Noel Gallagher said, when discussing David Bowie's sudden re-emergence. They're not always, Noel. Take Suede, the band who kickstarted Britpop in 1993: Brett Anderson and Co got back together in 2010 for a one-off concert at the Albert Hall for the Teenage Cancer Trust and enjoyed themselves so much that they re-formed and recorded Bloodsports, their sixth album and first for more than ten years.
It seems strange to talk about Suede as having unfinished business — five albums in a ten-year career is more than most manage. But they went out on a downer (2002's A New Morning was a pale imitation of past glories), so the fact that Bloodsports recalls their mid-Nineties pomp is worth celebrating. It's certainly a more fitting footnote to their career, should it prove to be the band's swansong.
Bloodsports is not a reinvention. It could be a lost Suede album from their golden period, full of huge choruses, spiky, glam riffs and moments of wistful, romantic introspection. It sounds fresh and vital.
Barriers is widescreen guitar pop with a jubilant outro that recalls the stadium rock of Simple Minds. Anderson's voice, once scrawny, is resonant and powerful throughout. Trademark tales of urban decay permeate the dark, jagged riffs of It Starts and Ends With You and Hit Me, and Always is a lavish, windswept ballad.
You might not have noticed they'd gone, but there's no denying that it's great to have them back in such fine fettle.
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Re: bloodsports promo and reviews

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http://all-noise.co.uk/album-review-sue ... orts/4340/
Mar 16, 2013
Album Review: Suede – ‘Bloodsports’
By Luke Glassford
4 / 5 stars
Coming more than a decade after their career destroying fifth album A New Morning, and having to compete for attention with a certain other ‘comeback’ album – the question on cynical lips when Bloodsports was announced was ‘do we really need another Suede album?’
While it’s an easy judgement to make, it’s a bit unfair to lump all of the reforming 90’s band together and dismiss them as last-hurrah chancers – and with Bloodsports Suede completely blow the rest away with arguably their best album since Dog Man Star.
They were obviously keen to hit the ground running with Bloodsports, jamming the opening half of it with the kind of soaring and emotive pop songs only Suede at their best can pull off. ‘Barriers’ has the slow building drama of early U2, ‘Snowblind’ features a swaggering and angular riff from Richard Oakes, ‘It Starts An Ends With You’ is just a brilliantly simple and energetic pop song, ‘Sabotage’ gracefully flows on another great lead guitar line from Oakes and ‘For The Strangers’ harks back to the best bits from their last good album Coming Up.
The pick of this relentless burst of brilliant pop songs though is ‘Hit Me’. A song so rousing it can get away with the lyric “Come on and hit me with your majesty”. The big factor in that lyric working, and all of these songs sounding so great is Brett Anderson. The singer sounds so good on Bloodsports that suggesting it as a ‘return to form’ doesn’t really do him justice – it would probably be more accurate to suggest he’s in the form of his life.
On the albums first ballad, and overall highlight, ‘Sometimes I Feel I’ll Float Away’ Anderson is in complete control – pulling the track from gentle and atmospheric beginnings into a huge and highly charged chorus. Coupled with another great guitar line from Oakes, this time echoing OK Computer-era Radiohead (I kid you not) – the result is truly majestic.
The hit ratio dips slightly towards the end of Bloodsports. ‘What Are You Not Telling Me?’ is an effective, if not totally convincing, mournful ballad and ‘Always’ feels like it is straining too hard to be enigmatic and interesting. It’s decent though, and leads nicely into the cinematic album closer ‘Faultlines’.
For an album by a band supposedly past their prime, Bloodsports is far better than it has any right to be. With a huge show at Alexandra Palace at the end of this month and presumably a lot of festival slots over the summer, 2013 could well see the second coming of Suede – whether we need it or not!
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Re: bloodsports promo and reviews

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http://www.nouse.co.uk/2013/03/16/album ... oodsports/
Saturday 16 March 2013
Album Review: Suede – Bloodsports
By Callum Reilly
After 11 years away, Suede return with new album ‘Bloodsports’. Callum Reilly reviews
The release of Bloodsports sees Britpop poster-boys Suede break their decade-long recording hiatus. Sure, they could’ve simply picked up their respective instruments and carried on from where they departed. Yes, their previous album A New Morning may have musically been a prototype for singer Anderson and ex-guitarist Butler’s reunion in The Tears, but it was lacking what made Suede different from the later mainstays of Britpop. You’d be forgiven for thinking Bloodsports might be some nostalgic foray, yet it feels like an entirely new effort.
‘Barriers’ ceremoniously kick-starts the album with a simple but intense guitar line and cascading drums oddly reminiscent of Joy Division’s ‘Atmosphere’. The remainder of Bloodsports is perhaps a little less forced, but no less powerful. In that respect, ‘It Starts and Ends With You’ is an unsurprising single choice, although it’s not necessarily the best track on record; no song strikes out quite as emphatically as ‘Hit Me’, with its unyielding beat and a classic, fuzzy Suede solo – yes, even a band as serious as Suede can’t resist just a little self-referential throwback.
However, Bloodsports is more highly-polished compared with the previous two albums, perhaps down to the return of former producer Ed Buller. The end result is an otherwise brittle sound draped in a stylish gloss. Anderson’s signature delivery has also been revived, every word being exuberantly twisted, almost hissed. You could call the music romantic were it not for bouts of surreal meanderings like “we slither and slide and slip/stings like aerosol in my eyes” (from ‘For the Strangers’), which Anderson roguishly distorts into something apparently more beautiful.
Time has worked wonders on Bloodsports. If you are expecting songs to rival the anthemic ‘Animal Nitrate’ (or, indeed, if the only Blur album you listened to was Parklife), you may be disappointed. Nor does it have the glam-tastic optimism of Coming Up or Head Music. Instead, Suede have started afresh in an uncertain decade. That is played up by the fact that the album gets progressively more downbeat in the closing tracks, with ‘Faultlines’ and ‘What Are You Not Telling Me?’ sounding like an exaggerated farewell. A lone criticism is that this unease is definitely not true to the album itself. One thing’s for sure, though: this is not an awkward goodbye, but a glorious return.
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Re: bloodsports promo and reviews

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http://www.theartsdesk.com/new-music/cd ... loodsports
Sunday, 17 March 2013
CD: Suede - Bloodsports
Britpop's anticipators return, armed with tunes and ready
by Thomas H Green
Suede, enigmatic and sexy, if you like that sort of thing
You will have to excuse my solipsism but I can find no way into this review without my own preoccupations butting rudely in. Music journalists sometimes end up reviewing albums utterly disconnected to their own interests, background and musical tastes. Some overcome this with ease, finding their inner dispassionate judge, while others find a meaty angle that adheres closely to their own perspectives, then pile in. I am closer in tone to the latter. However, it would be unfair and boring to play that game with Suede.
I don’t like them and never have, yet they were ahead of the pack, a vanguard to that mid-‘Nineties British retro guitar explosion the mainstream music press used to masturbate over so frantically. My view at the time was that Suede were a yelping Bowie mosquito humming unnoticed around the peripheral fringes of a populace high on beats-per-minute, a country too busy raving to pay much attention to what a few journos were writing about a scene in Camden.
They had something, though, and they still do. It galls me to say so. Their new album - only their sixth and their first in over a decade – is strong. It opens slowly and not entirely convincingly but by the fourth song, “Sabotage”, with its epic squall of bell-like, melodic guitars, they’re doing their thing with aplomb. The band’s louche, iconic singer Brett Anderson is in good voice, his tones cracking into an emotive falsetto during “Hit Me”, and his lyrical pith intact on lines such as “I need you more than you need to be needed so I sign my will one stab at a time” (from “Sometimes I Feel I’ll Float Away”). Even the slowies have class, especially the crooning atmospheric “Always” and piano-led “What Are You Not Telling Me?” Unfortunately, their sound brings out a negative knee-jerk reaction deep within my brain, but if you even vaguely like Suede, ignore this writer, they’re on form and you should check out Bloodsports.
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Re: bloodsports promo and reviews

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http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-enter ... 37354.html
16 March 2013
Album: Suede, Bloodsports (Warner)
Simon Price
Well, what did you expect? A sad attempt to recapture former glories? You were half-right.
Bloodsports, the first Suede album since their ignominious fizzle 11 years ago, is an exhilarating attempt to recapture those glories. Recorded with early producer Ed Buller, it's what everyone wanted: a Suede album in every respect, from the brash, vibrant guitars and Brett Anderson's thrilling vocals right down to the b'boom-boom before each chorus.
Lyrically, we're straight into Suede-world too: there may be no poison rain or nuclear wind, but there are aniseed kisses, roman candles, dandelion clocks and aerosol cans, gutters and drains, scratches and scars, references to Penguin Modern Classics and "a hairline crack in a radiator, leaking life".
Bloodsports repeats the Dog Man Star trick of loading the barnstorming glam-indie anthems – typified by the single "It Starts and Ends with You" – towards the front, and ending on a run of showstopping slowies.
In the canon, Bloodsports is effortlessly superior to its predecessor A New Morning, and averages out roughly on a level with Head Music (though more consistent in quality).
Suede aren't just back. Suede are Suede.
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Re: bloodsports promo and reviews

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http://www.heraldscotland.com/arts-ents ... d.20499021
Suede: Bloodsports (Suede Ltd)
Sunday 17 March 2013
Incredibly, it's 20 years since Suede won the Mercury Music Prize with their self-titled debut album. To put that into perspective, the same amount of time passed between David Bowie releasing the classic Low and the drum-and-bass-influenced Earthling. But while there was a world of difference between those two albums, this comeback from the early darlings of the 1990s Camden scene shows no such variation. And amen to that, because what Bloodsports does more than anything else is remind us that today's indie rock orthodoxy – jerky, anaemic stuff played by nerdy boys in Clark Kent glasses – is a poor successor to the churning guitars, unashamed carnality and dark glamour of what came before, a generation led by Brett Anderson and Suede. From opening song Barriers to closer Faultlines, this is an exciting, vigorous album which, while it adds nothing new to the band's DNA, still fizzes with more confidence and melodic invention than seems decent in a 39-minute set. An impressive return from a band I didn't know I could miss so much.
Barry Didcock
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Re: bloodsports promo and reviews

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http://hootingandhowling.com/album-bloodsports-suede/
March 17, 2013
ALBUM: Bloodsports // Suede
By Daisy Edwards
Since departing on the self admittedly not so brilliant note of ‘A New Morning‘ and leaving it hanging in the balance of “There will be another record. But not yet.“, Suede have kept us waiting for glimmers of said record for the best part of ten years, giving ‘Bloodsports‘ certainly a lot to make up for. Fortunately, the band appear unfaltered in the time of reunion mishaps and will-they-won’t-they’s, and suddenly, the gritty romanticism is back in full flow, and Suede seem as relevant to contributions of outstanding English music as they did in 1993.
‘Barriers‘ is still the sweeping stadium epic of as many Brett Anderson-esque lyrics crammed into 3 minutes as possible (by no means a bad thing), introducing the typical passionate content expected of them by now, while ‘Snowblind‘ continues the brazen stadium monster theme that feels like it’s been pryed from the grips of ‘Coming Up‘, both cementing the heart of what ‘Bloodsports‘ is about from start to finish.
Next comes first single, ‘It Starts And Ends With You‘, without a doubt the most undeniably pop song on the album. It’s catchy, and once again, could’ve easily been pulled from the ’90s back catalogue, the music is so naturally nonplussed by the ten years gone by, and that’s something to be admired if nothing else.
The rest of the album standouts follow quickly in suit; ‘Sabotage‘ being a reminiscent type fueled by biting guitars and cries of “thy will be done” - though those are slightly concerning if anything – whilst ‘For The Strangers‘ is the album’s strangely uplifting track, with it’s na-na-na’s and all you’d expect of a melancholic singalong. ‘Hit Me‘ soon crushes all of this in an instant, with the glamrock energy of ‘Electricity‘ and generally brash sound, it is undoubtedly the best thing Suede have come up in a few albums.
At this point, the album drops all in favour of the romantic crooners. ‘Sometimes I Feel I’ll Float Away‘ gets away with it in magnificent experimental style and ‘What Are You Not Telling Me?‘ too retains the brilliance within it’s austerity, however penultimate track ‘Always‘ is very much the opposite, another slow one, only this time very much forgettable. You can’t have an album without one slightly under par track, but this appears a downward spiral, being just that bit too hard. The pain is not left for long due to ‘Faultlines‘ , and whilst it may be the fourth slow ballad type in a row, it is the perfect album closer. It’s sorrowful and persistent and seems a fitting end to the rather romantic journey that is ‘Bloodsports‘.
Brett Anderson & co. don’t seem quite done with making standout records just yet and this is no exception, miles away from 2003 and a ’90s sound that is still as great as it ever could be, the whole thing sounds exactly like you’d expect Suede to sound in 2013: very much still brilliant.
9/10
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Re: bloodsports promo and reviews

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http://whatculture.com/music/suede-bloo ... t07KgGJ.01
Suede – Bloodsports Album Review
March 18, 2013
Rating: 4/5
Release date: Monday 18th March 2013
There’s a certain irony that Suede’s comeback album, their first in ten and a half years since 2002′s lacklustre effort A New Morning, should arrive one week after David Bowie’s The Next Day.
Suede’s self-titled 1993 Mercury Prize winning debut was heavily indebted to glam-rock era Bowie, in particular Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars and, like that album, had a profound impact on the music of the era. This was an album don’t forget that precipitated the onset of Britpop, attracted almost unbridled adulation from the music press and drew the band comparisons with The Sex Pistols and The Smiths in terms of cultural significance. Bowie’s comeback has been lauded as one of the greatest in rock history; can Suede really pull off a resurgence one week later that anyone really cares about?
Thankfully, yes. Bloodsports is not just good, it’s really good. Brett Anderson and co have not opted to reinvent the wheel, but to cement and consolidate all the elements that made Suede great in the first place, which is why they’ve chosen to make an album that shares the epic sensibilities of Dog Man Star reflected through the blissful indie pop lens of Coming Up.
Glorious album opener Barriers drips with purpose and intent and the chorus of “we jumped over the barriers” could not be more apt for a band that nearly fell into the abyss due to drug addiction. It’s quintessential vintage Suede: effervescent and exhilirating, showing that Anderson’s lyrics and vocals are back to his best (“Aniseed kisses and lipstick traces, lemonade sipped in Belgian rooms/ Couldn’t replace the graceful notions, that clung to me when I clung to you…”). In anyone else’s hands the riffs and melodies might sound overblown, but Suede have always had a way of making bittersweet meoldrama seem effortlessly cool.
Riotous hook-laden lead single It Starts And Ends With You encapsulates the recurrent themes of the album: lust, love and obsession intertwined (“I fall to the floor like my strings are cut/ Pinch myself but I don’t wake up/ Spit in the wind cause too much is not enough”).
Hit Me is the Beautiful Ones of Bloodsports- majestic indie-pop at its finest, with a chorus and melody so uplifting that it’s bound to top a thousand playlists this summer. The rush of the melody and the impossibly catchy refrain of “Come on and hit me with your majesty/ Come on and hit me with all your mystery” recalls that giddy fantastic feeling in your stomach when you’ve concinved yourself that you’ve found the one and that they love you back.
Like the tone of the doomed relationships that it so expertly soundtracks Bloodsports becomes progressively darker and Anderson’s lyrics more reflective, starting with the dark expansive synthy bluster of Sabotage and ending with the forlorn balladry of album closer Faultlines. These tracks are bursting with the anguish and fragility that characterised some of Suede’s finest works. Guitarist Richard Oakes must be sick to death of the Bernard Butler comparisons but his emphatic guitarwork is outstanding here, nowhere more than on the awesome Snowblind, on which producer Ed Buller does a fine job of accenuating the dynamic between lead guitarist and singer.
Bloodsports is a fresh, dazzling and defiant comeback which- at a lean ten tracks- is brimming with killer songs. Welcome back, Mr Anderson.
Key Tracks:
1. Barriers
2. Snowblind
3. It Starts and Ends With You
6. Hit Me
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Re: bloodsports promo and reviews

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http://www.nme.com/reviews/suede/14204
March 18, 2013
Suede - 'Bloodsports'
7 / 10
Picture Brett Anderson. Now picture Brett Anderson a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away (2002, to be precise). Picture a Brett Anderson who, just like fellow loveable but flawed ne’er-do-well Han Solo, has been frozen in carbonite – both as a punishment for wrongdoing (that year’s album ‘A New Morning’), and to stop him unleashing any more evil unto the world (a follow-up to ‘A New Morning’). Suspended in time for eternity, his hand placed tantalisingly near his rump but cruelly thwarted from giving his arse a thwack.
Snooty so-and-sos would have you believe this is the kindest fate for Suede, even after the spate of reunion shows that kicked off in 2010. Thankfully they can be ignored, for they are largely talking bollocks. Instead, ‘Bloodsports’ finally provides the send-off Suede’s legacy deserved 10 years ago. And, fittingly, it’s due to them thumbing their noses at the notion of growing old gracefully, and making brilliantly daft pop music instead. Take opening track ‘Barriers’: its overblown intro, its huge, womping chorus, Brett’s so-gaudy-they’re-great lyrics about “Aniseed kisses and lipstick traces/Lemonade sipped in Belgian rooms”. From a man who, legend has it, once stuck his head out of his window and yelled to all and sundry that he had the best drugs in London, anything less ridiculous would have been fucking heartbreaking.
‘Snowblind’ comes on like a filthy elder relative of 1994 single ‘We Are The Pigs’, with bitingly scuzzy guitar courtesy of Richard Oakes and Brett’s high-camp, dripping-poison yelping (“The rumours burn like Roman candles”), while ‘For The Strangers’ is another romanticised paean to the outsider à la 1996’s ‘Trash’ in which being besotted “stings like aerosol in my eyes”. Both sound like they could have been churned out of the same Bangers Factory that spawned the pop goodness of the band’s third album, 1996’s ‘Coming Up’ – huge choruses, glistening top-end melodies, riffs so shiny they’d make a magpie envious – but elsewhere there’s ‘Dog Man Star’-era moodiness, too. ‘Sabotage’ is built on eerie, jilted foundations and dark glimpses of sordid relationships (“She knows there are places I can’t go/But if I did, I’d make her follow”) and, even if closer ‘Faultlines’ falls short of early comparisons to ‘The Asphalt World’, its stunted, scraping strings and gloaming orchestral clangs create a fine glam’n’gloomy climax.
As ever, the road to redemption is littered with the odd pothole: ‘Hit Me’ has all the ingredients of classic Suede but comes out decidedly stodgy. And while there’s a fine line between silliness and genius, it’s not hard to work out which side of the divide ‘It Starts And Ends With You’ errs on with the lyrical clanger “Like a hairline crack in a radiator, leaking life”. But that doesn’t stop ‘Bloodsports’ from righting previous wrongs and proving the naysayers to be fools: staying frozen in the past isn’t the only way of becoming a stonking bunch of flashboys all over again, forever more.
Ben Hewitt
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Re: bloodsports promo and reviews

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http://www.dailystar.co.uk/music/view/3 ... um-review/
Suede: Bloodsports
18th March 2013
By John Earls
WHO would have thought Suede would return with something this fresh?
They maybe older ad more settle, but the dar romance that made their early songs so addictive is back. Old fans will be in heaven and they'll pick up a new generation of troubled souls. Hard to think of a better post-split comeback.
9/10
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Re: bloodsports promo and reviews

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http://popshifter.com/2013-03-18/music- ... oodsports/
Music Review: Suede, Bloodsports
Published on March 18th, 2013
By Less Lee Moore
Is it bird song?
Or is it just the car alarms
Making us feel so young?
Savage like the dawn.
—Suede, “Fault Lines”
My love for Suede stretches back to the summer of 1993, when I first saw the videos for “Metal Mickey” and “The Drowners.” Suede looked, sounded, felt like a band you could fall in love with. I was fortunate enough to see them live in New Orleans in October 1993. After that, my fandom was eternal.
While their eponymous debut and Dog Man Star were immaculate and masterful, subsequent releases were less so. “Trash” and “The Chemistry Between Us” are amazing, but on the whole, Coming Up is fairly disappointing both musically and lyrically (although the latter quality is at least enjoyably ridiculous), coming across as more frivolous and brittle than one would have expected after the gravitas of Dog Man Star.
Though it wasn’t as successful as Coming Up, Head Music is a better album; there’s far more diversity and daring in the musicality and frankly, it has better songs, lyrics, and vocal performances throughout. While technically a B-sides compilation, Sci-Fi Lullabies has as many consistently spectacular songs as the first two studio albums.
By the time their farewell disc, A New Morning, was in progress, between rumors of the album being called Instant Sunshine and Brett Anderson dying his hair blonde, I was thoroughly disinterested and never bothered to get the album. This is an embarrassing admission. Subsequent examination reveals that it’s not terrible, even if “Positivity” feels positively bland. Though I’ve not listened to much of Anderson’s solo work, I did enjoy Here Come The Tears. But like all the other Suede fans, old and new, I always hoped they’d regroup and release something new.
So here we are in 2013 with Bloodsports. There will be those who complain “it’s not as good as ______” or use the cringe-inducing phrase “return to form,” but let’s be honest: Nothing Suede can do at this point will please fans who want them to make Dog Man Star II but who would bitch and moan if they actually did so. Bloodsports is for the rest of us.
If it’s true that Suede makes music for the rest of the world, then the fans are truly blessed. Bloodsports is excellent, overflowing with extraordinarily hooky tunes, stunning vocals, and juicy chunks of guitar. It doesn’t concern itself with the beautiful ones or the trash, and there are no mentions of council estates. The dystopian world of Bloodsports deals with the perils of the heart (and by extension, the loins).
The first six tracks could easily all be singles, but “It Starts And Ends With You” is the official single and it’s definitely on par with any of their previous ones. How it isn’t a massive hit already is all about what’s happened in the music industry in the decade since Suede broke up, and not the quality of the song itself. Full of evocative imagery, it’s more invigorated than one could have imagined at this point in the band’s career. Those who doubted they still had this in them should be ashamed.
“Barriers,” which the band released for free in February, soars on heartbreak and emotion, and Richard Oakes’s riffage. The alliteration in “Snowblind” is lovely, with a classic Suede chorus and a sweeps-you-off-your-feet bridge, plus some gorgeous bass work from Mat Osman, who is much more integral to the band’s sound than I’d previously—erroneously—assumed. “Sabotage,” apparently the one track from a series of songs that was scrapped in favor of these ten gems, flirts with suicide and religion but is wedded to Simon Gilbert’s booming drums.
“For The Strangers” has a fantastic bridge and chiming, purring guitars. “Hit Me” should be the next single, if singles mean anything anymore in this crazy world. More heavy drums, a “la la la la la” bridge, and a familiar-yet-fresh sound that makes Dog Man Star feel like it came out last year instead of nearly 20.
After a six-song-assault proving Suede are at the top of their collective game, things turn melancholy—but no less accomplished—with “Sometimes I Feel I’ll Float Away.” Anderson’s exquisite lyrics and vocals, Oakes’s jewel-toned guitar, and Neil Codling’s sepulchral synths, are all marked with the majesty of Suede’s best. “What Are You Not Telling Me?” is stark—all echoed vocals and piano, and a spare, unanswered chorus.
If there’s a weak spot on Bloodsports it’s the first half of “Always,” but by the time the massive musical and vocal buildup arrives at the end, you’ve likely forgotten about its flaws, wondering if the protagonist is a ghost or a suicide victim (or both). The rueful puns of “Fault Lines” are simultaneously bleak and buoyant, ending on a provocative note: “We live, we live again/There is no fear now/for us to feel.” It’s hard not to see this as somewhat autobiographical.
Bloodsports is astonishing and wonderful, not just as a “comeback” album, but as an album by one of the most critically underrated bands of the last few decades. It’s Suede at their most energized, engaging, and essential. It will make you fall in love with them all over again.
Bloodsports is out today from Warner Music Group on CD, vinyl, and digital formats. You can listen to the album streaming on NPR.
There are least five extra tracks for the album—”Dawn Chorus,” “Howl,” “Nothing Can Stop Us,” and “No Holding Back”—but not all the songs are available on every format. The Super Deluxe Edition blog has an explanation of the confusion (but it might not make cash-strapped fans happy).
Suede will be playing Rock City in Nottingham on March 28 and Alexandra Palace in London on March 30. For more visit the band’s website and Facebook pages, one for Suede and one for The London Suede (yes, that silliness is still going on).
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Re: bloodsports promo and reviews

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http://musosguide.com/suede-bloodsports/25941
Suede – Bloodsports
March 18, 2013
By Ben Gibson
March 18, 2013
When Suede broke up in 2003 Brett Anderson famously told journalists he needed to “get his demon back”. It is easy to see why, as aside from a couple of songs, Suede’s final two albums (Head Music and A New Morning) were serious disappointments.
It’s fair to say that despite some good signs – the band seemed fired up in interviews, the return of long standing producer Ed Buller – this reviewer was sceptical about new material. Two minutes in to lead single ‘It Starts And Ends with You’ and all fears dissolved. This epic slab of punchy glam rock is as good as all but the very best Suede songs. It seemed to indicate the return to form fans had been hoping for.
Disappointingly for those hoping for a record as great as their classic self-titled debut, ‘It Starts And Ends With You’ gets my vote for album stand out. However that doesn’t mean the single is a false dawn. There isn’t a bad song on here and some, like ‘Sabotage’ and ‘For The Strangers’ are revelations. In fact, all of the first six tracks are beautifully crafted rockers capable of kicking your night off in style.
Bloodsports has an accessibility not seen since they first reinvented themselves with hit party album Coming Up. But it is also more joyful, more euphoric, and just as fun. Despite the lack of any obvious ‘Beautiful Ones’ style hits, this record is the more musically accomplished and dare I say it, better album.
Much of this is down to the herculean efforts of Richard Oakes, who finally steps out of the shadow of original Suede guitarist Bernard Butler with an utterly astonishing series of performances. From the majestic, uplifting ‘Hit Me’ to stunning album closer ‘Faultlines’ there isn’t a second here that isn’t improved by his masterful riffing.
The rest of the band are on top form too. The eternally overlooked rhythm section, particular bassist Mat Osman, put on a career best performance in Bloodsports.Not only that, but the sweeping orchestral arrangements which decorate the tracks are the cherry on top of an already delicious treat of an album.
Also to their credit is the inspired choice of Ed Buller as producer, who makes Bloodsports feel like a Suede record, and not a Brett Anderson solo project for the first time since 1997. With a lead singer as powerful as Anderson there is a tendency to allow him to overpower the rest of the band. Buller avoids this pitfall, allowing all the layers of the Suede sound to bubble through the mix.
Just as importantly, this means you don’t have to listen too hard to the lyrics, which are often melodramatic and nonsensical. We’ll never get our heads around what “like a cog without a martyr” means. We doubt the man himself really knows what he’s on about. Anderson may be a great singer but he is far from a great lyricist. Still, at least he’s stopped singing about bad sex in council flats.
Another problem is the sequencing. The choice to put all the ballads at the end of the album is bizarre. Aside from making the record sound less varied it also leaves us with an odd impression provided by a number of false endings. Still, it’s hard to be too upset when listening to an album without a single bad song. Although the ballads are a step behind the first half of the album, they are still frequently interesting and often inspiring. Looks like they got their demon back.
Bloodsports is out now and available from amazon and iTunes.
sunshine
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Re: bloodsports promo and reviews

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http://blog.deezer.com/gb/5-minutes-of- ... son-suede/
March 18, 2013
posted by samlee
5 Minutes Of Your Time: Brett Anderson, Suede
This week sees Britpop heroes Suede releasing Bloodsports, their first album of new material for over a decade. It has been twenty years or so since they rose to prominence in the 90s with the likes of ‘Animal Nitrate’ and ‘Beautiful Ones’, but they are arguably a better band now than ever before. We caught up with Brett Anderson to talk about what’s changed for Suede over the years, and to hear why he felt like “giving up and throwing it all in” during the recording of Bloodsports…
How would you describe ‘Bloodsports’?
I think it’s quite intense. It’s a classic Suede record really, it’s got elements of intensity, there’s a lot of melody, there’s a lot of noise – but there’s also a lot of beauty in there as well. It’s an album about the struggle and the battlefield of relationships. I think the one word that sums it all up is intensity, it’s quite dramatic.
You’ve said that this record was possibly the hardest album you’ve ever made. Why was it so difficult?
I think it was hard because you come back after ten years of being away and it’s a very, very tricky balancing act getting the correct point between sounding like yourself but sounding like it’s fresh. When you come back you’ve got a lot of re-learning to do, a lot of re-learning with the other members of the band, a lot of re-learning about what it is to be in the band you’re in. So I think a lot of it was just getting back on the same wavelength. I think also you’re confronted with the weight of your past. Suede have put out a lot of what I think are very good records, written lots of good songs and I didn’t want to let anyone down really, least of all myself. I wanted the sound to be able to compete with the past. Did I feel any pressure? Yeah, the same pressure that you always feel though, the pressure to create something beautiful out of nothing, to create alchemy. There’s always a pressure, it doesn’t matter how many people are listening – or not listening – you’re always trying to do your best, it’s a battle against yourself. If there isn’t pressure when you’re making a record then there’s something wrong, you need that pressure to get it right.
Ed Buller (who produced the first three Suede albums) scrapped a lot of the songs you had written for this album – did you find that hard to take?
Yeah, really hard. There were lots of points during the making of this record when I just felt like giving up and throwing it all in, but if you trust someone and you want to work with them, you’ve got to take their opinion. Ed is like a member of the family – he can say things to us and we can say things to him that other people might think are offensive, but both parties know that it’s just like having a squabble over the dinner table – you can say something and it can quickly be forgotten. It’s just a part of the process of working together, he was honest enough to reject a lot of stuff and it was really, really hard but looking back on it I’m really, really glad he did because without Ed the record would have sounded completely different. He was hugely instrumental in the sound of this record, and I’ve got a huge amount of respect for him.
Why do you think that your music has remained relevant?
Um, well… I’m glad if that is true. I think, at the end of the day, it’s about songwriting. A great song is a great song no matter what the era is. For me, Suede have never been a fashion band that adopts the latest fashion and buys the newest gear to sound like the coolest kids on the block. It’s never been like that – the heart of what we did has always been about writing songs that tried to move people and I think if you do that and you do that well, I think that there’s a timelessness to that. And the things that I was singing about in 1992 are still relevant to me – I was singing about loneliness and sex and isolation and disintegration and poverty, and all of these things still mean something to people now. I still feel very much that when we play the old songs live it doesn’t feel nostalgic to me, it doesn’t feel like we’re playing things from twenty years ago – it just feels like we’re playing a great song.
Have your own influences changed over the years that you’ve been away?
My own influences have changed in that new bands have come along that I like. There’s always someone making interesting music somewhere in the world, and if you’re not open to that then you need to think about what you’re doing. I think it’s part of the creative process, taking things in in order to let things out. I like lots of things; Interpol and The Horrors, and Foals and interesting leftfield guitar bands. Bat For Lashes, These New Puritans, things like that.
In the past you were always reluctant to accept your status as a band, but now you seem happier to embrace it and play the bigger venues – what’s changed?
I think we feel more confident in playing in those places because we feel that we can put on a good show in those places, that’s the simple truth. I think years ago we always underplayed Suede, even at its commercial peak when we were selling millions of records. Even in 1996-97 when we had ‘Coming Up’ out and it was Number 1 and it had five Top 10 singles, we still played a few nights at The Roundhouse rather than Wembley Arena or something like that. We didn’t feel that the experience would work in a big venue, but I think that as you get more confident about playing live you can grow into a bigger-sized venue and you know how to do it. So I think it’s just a simple fact of feeling more confident. I think we’re much better as a live band than we ever were.
You’ve hinted that there could be more new material to come – what can we expect from Suede in the future?
Well, I think first of all we have to find out how we feel about the record when the dust settles before we can actually promise anything else. But I like to think we can make more music – that’s been the most amazing thing for me about making this album, now I know that Suede can make new music, and I didn’t know that before. That was a huge revelation for me, before we made this album there was a possibility that we couldn’t write decent songs together, and now I know we can. I think you have to be very nurturing of that, when you find a creative chemistry that works with some people or one person you shouldn’t throw it away because it doesn’t happen with everyone – it’s not like I can drag some bloke off the street and write a great album with him, so you need to respect that. So I’d like to make some more records together.
sunshine
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Re: bloodsports promo and reviews

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2013/ma ... t-anderson
Suede: Bloodsports – review
(Warner)
Phil Mongredien
The Observer, Sunday 17 March 2013
3/5
On their first album in 11 years, a re-formed and revitalised Suede appear to have succeeded in turning the clock back to 1996. Snowblind and the excellent Hit Me in particular reprise the thrilling pop dynamics of Trash and Beautiful Ones to fine effect. Brett Anderson's lyrics, meanwhile, so ridiculed during the late 1990s at the peak of his crack problem, are full of evocative imagery again, rather than sounding merely infantile. The quality tails off quite dramatically, with a string of unremarkable ballads closing the album, but this is still a pleasing return to something approaching their best.
sunshine
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Re: bloodsports promo and reviews

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http://consequenceofsound.net/2013/03/a ... dsports-2/
Album Review: Suede – Bloodsports
By Jon Hadusek on March 18th, 2013 in Album Reviews
Our rating:
They hadn’t even released an album and the British music press was already putting Suede on the highest of hype-machine pedestals. After the idleness and eventual mediocrity of The Stone Roses, Britpop needed a new face — a new identity. Enter Suede: androgynous glam rockers with a taste for huge hooks, pop ingenuity, and mutinous, inter-band drama.
Frontman Brett Anderson made the most of this situation, adopting his new stardom with confidence and swagger. Borrowing Bowie’s theatrics and Morrissey’s romanticism, Anderson looked, sounded, and acted the part of ‘rockstar’ — partying lavishly and consuming copious drugs, much to the dismay of strident guitarist Bernard Butler. They were Suede, essentially: Anderson crooning tales of lust and brokenhearts, Butler picking melancholic blues scales with eloquence. Their artistic compatibility notwithstanding, the two had disparate personalities. Butler was so repulsed by Anderson’s rockstar antics, that he sometimes rode in a separate tour bus.
These differences culminated during the recording of Suede’s 1994 sophomore album, Dog Man Star. After disagreeing over the involvement of producer Ed Buller, Butler left Suede. Dog Man Star was finished without him (though he does share songwriting credits on every track) and stands as Suede’s finest musical achievement — a multi-layered, cinematic record about slow death, addiction, James Dean, and everything that Blur and Oasis never sang about.
Anderson loathed Britpop. He hated being lumped into a trend and tagged with a set of ideals he didn’t necessarily believe. He wasn’t a ‘lad’ or a Beatle wannabe, and Dog Man Star — which he wrote while holed up in a Victorian mansion with a stash of hard drugs — was his reaction to it all. Naturally, the album didn’t sell as well as its contemporaries and Suede’s music slowly became overshadowed by the Britpop phenomenon it helped spark.
Over a decade later, Anderson’s still bitter about it. Of Suede’s new album, Bloodsports, he said: “What does it sound like? Oh! I don’t know, probably like some artist on some drug, engaged in a game of quoits with some other artist on another drug, you can adopt your own journalistic cliché if you haven’t grown up yet.” A not so subtle nod to Dog Man Star and the polarized reception it received.
But the reference makes sense, because Bloodsports — Suede’s first record in 11 years — sounds like the spiritual successor to Dog Man Star. Producer Ed Buller is back, and although guitarist Richard Oakes isn’t Bernard Butler, he does a damn good job of emulating Butler’s expressive style. Musically, this reunited Suede mimes Suede circa ’94. Songs ride an unassuming mid-tempo rhythm that gives the reigns to Anderson and Oakes. Buller’s production emulates the vintage Suede sound; he puts just enough reverb on Anderson’s vocals and places Oakes’ guitar at a perfect depth in the mix. The aesthetics are in place; the rest is up to Anderson…
With a flair for the (melo)dramatic, Anderson toes a thin line as a songwriter. His shtick screams pretension, yet he’s so good at what he does, the perceptions don’t matter. Bloodsports emphasizes this, seeing him return to his recurring role of relationship narrator. On opener “Barriers”, the lovers in question are overcoming their conflicts as they “jump over the barriers”. But then there’s “What Are You Not Telling Me?”, which examines the tension right before a relationship snaps.
Romantic observations. This was what defined the lyrics of Dog Man Star, and it’s what defines the lyrics of Bloodsports. Anderson makes his motifs apparent — and his dry vocabulary is concise and effective. “You feel the scratches and scars / You feel the parts of me that we call ‘ours’”, he sings on the album’s poppiest nugget, “Hit Me”. Whether it be sexual masochism or tragic breakups, Bloodsports depicts love as a game of “he vs. she” — artwork included. To Anderson, the battle is inevitable; it’s how you cope. That’s what he’s concerned with.
And he just wrings everything out of a chorus. The first three songs here — “Barriers”, “Snowblind”, and “It Starts and Ends With You” — are essentially verse-chorus-verse-bridge and so on. Yet, Anderson’s melodies are so satisfying and grandiose; they get tangled with Oakes’ jangly guitar, most notably on “For the Strangers”. Building up from a thin guitar lick, the acoustic-tinged track rises to a surging, harmonized chorus. “For all the strangers, for all the strangers out there,” sings Anderson.
Bloodsports is unrelentingly beautiful and catchy throughout its first six tracks, but then it becomes dark and meditative. Oakes takes a backing role to keyboardist Neil Codling on “Sometimes I Feel I’ll Float Away”. And does the same on “What Are You Not Telling Me?”. No more catchy choruses. Anderson follows Codling’s lead, favoring a nuanced croon rather than his signature whine. Butler-era Suede shined when it came to these slow brooders, and reunited Suede is just as competent.
However, the slow tracks are concentrated at the end of the album, killing the momentum and pace set by Bloodsports’ first half. The tracklist could’ve used some evening out. The record’s mastering also leaves much to be desired, as it suffers typical blown out EQs (read: loudness war) and abrasive volume levels on drummer Simon Gilbert’s cymbal crashes.
Despite the tracklist and mastering, Bloodsports is an achievement. Who could’ve ever anticipated Suede — after a decade of inactivity — reuniting for such a striking record? It’s one that recalls the band’s creative heyday, without all the Anderson-Butler baggage or sequestered-in-a-mansion theatrics. In a way, it’s the most honest collection of songs Anderson’s ever written. Britpop was a graveyard, and Suede was a corpse in the ground. But now the band’s back to life — no UK music press on its back, nothing to prove, no legacies to maintain. Just 10 great songs.
Essential Tracks: “It Starts and Ends With You”, “For the Strangers”
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