Night Thoughts promotion/reviews

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sunshine
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Re: Night Thoughts promotion/reviews

Post by sunshine »

20 January 2016
Brett Anderson’s mob return with a soundtrack that itches to be heard with its visuals
by Guy Oddy
Bloodsports, Suede’s 2013 comeback album after several years’ hiatus, was something special with a re-engineered sound but one which stayed firmly within the familiar lyrical territory of death, love, anguish and despair. Never scared to try something new, Night Thoughts is an album that was conceived to accompany a film of the same name that received its debut performance last autumn at London’s Roundhouse. However, given that the music is only half of the project, listening to these tunes isn’t a totally satisfying experience on its own but it does generate enough curiosity to seek out the celluloid part of the package as well.
The Night Thoughts soundtrack is one that is largely characterised by ballads of various stripes but all dominated by the anguished singing of Brett Anderson. Strings and synths provide the musical accompaniment to “Pale snow”, while “Learning to be” comes over like a torch song with its whoozy piano backing. There’s even a power ballad of sorts in “I don’t know how to reach you”.
There is more lively fare though and “Outsiders”, “Like kids” and “No tomorrow” all pile on the New Wave guitar sounds, reverb-heavy production and anthemic choruses with Anderson’s obligatory angsty vocals. “What I’m trying to tell you” even hints at the classic Suede sound of twenty years ago. Nevertheless, as is also often the case with Mogwai, there does seem to be something missing. While Night Thoughts isn’t merely incidental music, it does suffer from not being as engaging and immediate as we have come to expect. However, their more thoughtful approach does bring something new to Suede’s sound and it certainly doesn’t mark a slide into blandness that so many reformed bands slip into all too easily.
http://www.theartsdesk.com/new-music/cd ... t-thoughts
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Re: Night Thoughts promotion/reviews

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19 January 2016
Night Thoughts proves Suede’s comeback was anything but a one-off final grasp at glory
By Jon Putnam
8
An album with nary a single, tracks segueing into each other, a concept (!) bolstered by an accompanying short film – oh how antiquated! And to hear Suede talk about the qualities of their latest album, Night Thoughts, this is the way things should be – and can be, given the band’s assured financial state and their elder statesmen status.
I haven’t seen the film, save for the snippets that serve as videos to the tracks the band has released thus far. However, Suede’s 2013 comeback Bloodsports sets the table nicely for Night Thoughts’ existence on solely its musical merits given that the former also followed a moderately loose, intermittently chronological concept itself, assuring the latter’s same qualities would not prove too jarring, particularly in the absence of its film.
As novel as the band would think Night Thoughts to be in theory and sound, it’s not markedly different than its predecessor and it, cleverly, pulls forward past themes, molding them into ripened versions palatable for their stalwart fans now two decades and more on. It’s clear Suede isn’t making a play for the kids’ dollars or pandering to any contemporary pop/rock fads – Night Thoughts would easily prove a seamless followup to its now-20 year old brother, Coming Up (as would Bloodsports, incidentally).
It’s obvious to view opener “When You Are Young” and its reprise, “When You Are Young”, as natural developments from the debut’s opener “So Young” or Coming Up b-side “Young Men”. Flashbacks to youth are bittersweet interludes here, relegating such pastime vices of “chasing the dragon” and “boozing on the train” to barely audible footnotes, instead throwing the emotional innocence of those times into stark relief against the gravity of real world, grown up concerns.
Like Bloodsports, Night Thoughts leans heavily on the hallmarks of Suede’s sounds – Brett Anderson’s distinctive, dramatic vocal delivery and Richard Oakes’ quicksilver guitar leads, both of which exhibit themselves as strong as they’ve ever been during the duo’s two decade tenure together. Where Night Thoughts distances itself from Bloodsports is in the quality of Anderson’s songwriting.
Anderson’s lyrics have often been a repository of lame-brained metaphors nearly as frequently as peerless arms aloft choruses. Bloodsports was no exception with its inexplicable “anise-seed kisses” popping up twice in just the opening pair of tracks. Night Thoughts is largely immune to this, perhaps Anderson finding enough ease to simply write what he feels paired with the personal conviction fixed to its subject matter.
Where similarly grandiose songwriters like Chris Martin and Bono flail at balancing the huge and intimate, the personal and mass appeal, Anderson strikes the perfect balance on Night Thoughts. These days a large contingent of Suede’s fans will have experienced raising children, their parents’ or their own divorce, caring for an aging loved one, the morphing of personal relationships as they age and competing priorities stretched across a finite capacity for attention inevitably creep in.
Night Thoughts’ accompanying film provides but one narrative arc constructed of Anderson’s songs, but their vagueness means that they can be open to a host of interpretations. “No Tomorrow” could translate to a young person careening off the straight and narrow just as it could the emptiness felt by aging parents in the silence of an empty nest home. “I Don’t Know How To Reach You” can easily be adopted as the credo of a distanced spouse or a desperate parent. Anderson achieves this open-ended malleability without sacrificing any of his emotional tenor.
Suede will always hold a plush, carved-out space in my heart, their Sci-Fi Lullabies b-side compilation kick starting my interest in Britpop from across the pond and pulling me into modern pop/rock music after high school years trolling rock music’s back pages. As a new father for the second time, the son of recently divorced parents, and the brother of a recovering wayward addict, I certainly can fashion my own narrative from the threads of Night Thoughts’ songs.
I certainly would never have thought that leather ass-slapping front man howling “Oh, how I’d love to turn you oooooon” would be my guide here, but I couldn’t be happier to find Night Thoughts providing the auspicious comfort that this latest period for Suede is anything but a one-off, fortuitous final shot at glory.
http://www.thelineofbestfit.com/reviews/albums/suede1
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Re: Night Thoughts promotion/reviews

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21 January 2016
Suede: Night Thoughts review – a florid, cinematic concept album
4 / 5 stars
(Warner Music)
Caroline Sullivan
“Do I want you because you’re out of reach?” Brett Anderson muses on Like Kids, halfway through Suede’s ambitious seventh album. He could be addressing the other partner in a floundering relationship, or something nameless floating at the fringes of his consciousness. Yearning and anxiety hover over the record – a concept album that begins with a suicide and plays out as the drowning man’s life flashes before his eyes. Night Thoughts is literally cinematic – it was written to accompany a film – but is also a standalone art-rock piece that adds another dimension to Suede’s universe. When You Are Young, the string-filled opener, is heavy with nostalgia and alienation, with Anderson offering one of the most florid performances of his life. The songs are sequenced without pauses, but the reward for listening all the way through is classic Suede pop moments such as No Tomorrow and What I’m Trying to Tell You and the creeping sadness of I Can’t Give Her What She Wants. Night Thoughts is another victory for the misfits.
http://www.theguardian.com/music/2016/j ... cept-album
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Re: Night Thoughts promotion/reviews

Post by sunshine »

January 21st
The Lead Review: Luke Turner On Suede's Night Thoughts
Luke Turner
"Everything is always going to be with a sense of drama." Brett Anderson's swapped crack for nappies, but the uncynical passion of years gone by is still present argues Luke Turner. But is this the best Suede album yet?
For a band so resolutely showy as Suede, their decision to launch seventh album Night Thoughts last November by playing behind a screen that took over the entire width of the Camden Roundhouse was a bold one. As strings and gigantic drums thundered around the venue, footage blinked into life of a man striding, despairing and defiant, into the sea from a British beach. Then, in a beautiful underwater shot, he drowned. A single spotlight picked out Brett Anderson behind the screen, singing and oddly present in the footage as the bubbles whirled around him.
This was the start to a remarkable evening that saw Suede thundering through their new album, seamless and in order, as the companion film (shot by Roger Sergeant) played in front of them, telling a tale of suicide, child death, crime, mental illness, breakdown, guilt and grief. It was the most exciting show I've seen them play since their emphatic comeback at the 100 Club in March 2010, and in the intermission the atmosphere in the crowd fizzed, many confessing to tears. The second half of the set, made up of belters from the near-25-years of their history, couldn't come close. There are few groups who can pull this off and, as a Suede fan, it made for a blessed relief. After all, they're a band who made their name by dealing with the heady passions of youth and I probably wasn't the only one worried what might happen were Brett Anderson to run out of gasoline. Or diesel, for that matter.
I needn't have been concerned, even if "night thoughts" are not what they were. Once in Suede world they'd probably have referred to drugged-up excursions across the city or been a euphemism for complicated sex. Instead, Suede's seventh album sees Brett Anderson taking inspiration from the anxieties of parenthood and how that has made him reassess his relationship with his own dad. In a recent Guardian interview, Anderson said of his new work/life balance, "I’m a full-time father. [Suede] feels like I’m putting on clothes – the other thing feels like the real thing."
Superficially this might seem like a remarkable transformation from a frontman whose band for years felt like a uniform and way of life, for him and the devoted alike. Yet Anderson has always been an acute observer of the world around him - if he could turn this skill to dole queues and druggy urban netherworlds, why not this? Night Thoughts is surely the record that Suede must have had brewing since they returned, still part of Anderson's single-minded focus, despite the changing subject matter. As he put it when I interviewed him in 2013, "I got utterly obsessed with my family instead of being obsessed with crack".
Dirty nappies are clearly a superior muse to the singed pipe. The twelve songs on Night Thoughts flow effortlessly into one another, just as they did at the Roundhouse. While Chief Rock of the Telegraph was rather over-egging the pudding when he wrote that that in the combination of film and music Suede are "reinventing" the album, it's certainly exciting to have the option of listening to them as accompaniment as well as on their own merit. Similarly, Sergeant's own narrative and eloquently-shot film suggests he's on the way to becoming a talent outside the music work he's known for - Suede picked him for the job after loving his pleasingly sleazy video for Fat White Family's 'Touch The Leather'. His footage compliments Suede's music in 2016 just as perfectly as did Derek Jarman's work with the tour videos to Dog Man Star tracks that Suede commissioned in the mid-1990s. In a world that fits within the Suede aesthetic without ever relying on its past staples of a grimy London at the centre of a vortex reeling in lives from dull suburbia, Sergeant doesn't create a literal cinematic interpretation of Anderson's lyrics as if they were a script, but tells his own story that touches on the same themes of family, worry, and loss.
Musically, Night Thoughts is the most solid and focussed-sounding album Suede have ever realised. If Bloodsports was a consolidation for the band that saw them asserting that not only could Suede MK III could not only be utterly vicious live but could also record a brilliant record, compared to this it sounds a little thin, too indebted to their frayed leather jacket, spidery glam rock past.
For starters, Richard Oakes is on absolutely terrific form, on arguably the first record where he sounds entirely comfortable in his own skin. I'm not really one to get excited about guitar solos, but the spiralling light he twists out on the epic melancholy of 'I Don't Know How To Reach You' is quite something. As well as Oakes' superlative playing, Mat Osman and Simon Gilbert's bass and drums have a propulsive quality perhaps not heard from them before. On top of it all, Anderson's voice continues to go from strength to strength - when the note lingers as he sings "falling like leaves" at the end of 'Learning To Be' it's proper goosebump stuff. Yes, as Anderson will readily admit, he has something of a marmite voice, but for those who get it, this is luxurious. Lurking in the background of all of it is Neil Codling who, as well as not ageing a day since about 1999, has worked with producer Ed Buller to create a richly arranged whole. If on Dog Man Star certain songs didn't quite mesh with the overall ambition, that's never the case here - the segueing of the tracks creates a heady, effervescent rush. Within that are some of the strongest songs Suede have written. 'Outsiders' and 'Like Kids' are classic Suede stompers, the latter a breezy number which sees the film element cleverly introducing visual elements from Suede's past - the Dog Man Star bare arse cover art becomes a hungover on his bed. Final track 'The Fur & The Feathers' is utterly dramatic, with cymbals crashing around all over the shop, orchestral pomp in perfect unison with the band.
In 1993, the writer Max Bell accompanied Suede on an early tour, focussing his article on the devotion of their already fanatical fans. "There is nothing really peculiar about any of these people, except their dedication," he wrote; "They aren't fair-weather friends, jumping on the bandwagon. They're not along for the ride. These people are here for the duration." He wasn't wrong. In July last year, Suede played the modernist surroundings of Bexhill Pavillion, a sleek venue in a dilapidated seaside town that couldn't be more Suede. It was fascinating to watch the crowd, drawn largely from the stalwart who'd made the duration - a still good-looking bunch, now lived-in, one eye on the kids at home. Everyone lost it, still shook their meat to the beat, as Suede's 'Beautiful Ones' had it. Many of those original fans, who first connected with Suede's naughty wide-eyed dreaming, are now of an age where Anderson's most personal lyricism yet will connect in a new, very different, way. Their times and lives have changed too, but the uncynical passion is still there, just as it is with the band onstage.
There's also clearly more than enough here to win the hearts of the younger fans who increasingly pack the front rows of Suede gigs. Anderson has been keen, after all, to ensure that this isn't a smug record, a musical equivalent of a broadsheet column about being a superdad. 'No Tomorrow', for instance, is what I think might be his first lyrical exploration of the impact that the depression suffered by his Frank Lizst-loving taxi driver had on their relationship. It's still a belting pop song, of course, and this being Suede everything is always going to be with a sense of drama. I remember visiting Anderson's West London house a few years ago for an interview and being amused that he'd removed the heads of his stepson's Harry Potter lego figures, and put them on plastic spikes above the castle gates. You can take the man out of the North London, Highgate mansion gothic, but you can't take the gothic out of the man.
Night Thoughts is a record that deals poetically and bravely with the shadows that start to grow as we age and life's responsibilities weigh heavier on our shoulders. Brett Anderson seems as comfortable writing about the aging process as he did chemical smiles in the backs of Volvos and bored suburban housewives done in on sleeping pills etc, something that bodes well indeed for the future. Is it Suede's best album? They're such a unique group that to compare this to the finest moments of their past seems churlish. It certainly is the sound of a band stepping out of their own shadow to finally be all they can be.
http://thequietus.com/articles/19571-su ... hts-review
sunshine
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Re: Night Thoughts promotion/reviews

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January 20, 2016
Suede: Night Thoughts
Suede Limited; 2016
By Stuart Berman
7.5
Blackstar isn’t the only album released this month to take on added poignancy in the wake of David Bowie’s passing. Suede are releasing a new album mere weeks after Bowie did the same—just like in March 2013, when both parties released comeback records following decade-long hiatuses. And while the timing may be purely coincidental, it’s an uncanny circumstance for a band that, throughout the '90s, provided the most resounding reminder of Bowie’s early-'70s supremacy, and helped rehabilitate his rep amidst a career nadir for a new generation of pretty things. Listening to Night Thoughts now is like hearing a eulogy from a favorite son—from its quasi-conceptual structure to its stardust-speckled guitar riffage to its abundance of misfit anthems and concert hall-crumbling ballads, the record is a testament to Bowie’s steely determination to make every song a seismic event.
That said, Suede are like the faithful scions who inherited the old family home, but didn't do much redecoration. They never shared their godhead’s flair for radical reinvention and experimentation; their discography effectively imagines an alternate 1975 where Bowie never went to Philly and continued to mine the dark majesty of the Aladdin Sane/Diamond Dogs era on through the '80s. The parameters of their sound were pretty much set with their first two albums—1993’s snappy, scrappy self-titled debut and 1994’s darkly ornate Dog Man Star—and the records that followed slid back and forth between those extremes. Bloodsports, their laudable 2013 return effort, hedged its bets by positioning itself smack dab in the middle of that spectrum, with the album’s invigorating first side balanced by a weightier second act. Their comeback now assured and their bravado fully restored, with Night Thoughts, Suede once again leap up off the dancefloor to swing from the chandeliers.
Night Thoughts isn’t a rock opera per se, though it gamely assumes the form of one. Several songs bleed into one another through swirling interstitials; the opening track is reprised in the penultimate position, Sgt. Pepper’s-style; and it sounds like at least half the recording budget was spent on the orchestra. It’s also accompanied by a fitfully bleak feature-length film (directed by NME photographer/Libertines documentarian Roger Sargent) that shows a drowning man’s reminiscences about the familial tragedy that’s driven him to commit suicide in the sea. (The band previewed the album last fall with front-to-back live performances synced up to the film.) But the songs themselves don’t actually form a linear narrative arc, reference specific characters, or directly correlate to the visuals. They’re more discrete portraits of passion, ostracization, betrayal, and depression—hardly uncharted territory for a Suede record. But the sheer, fetishistic intensity with which Brett Anderson delivers his lascivious lyrics—coupled with the balcony-baiting, pomped-up performance of the band—makes the wounds feel newly opened and the bruises freshly pressed.
That Night Thoughts’ cinematic companion piece centers around the story of an unglamorous middle-class family—rather than, say, the freakish, fashionable deviants that populate the band’s signature songs—underscores an essential truth about Suede today: They are no longer young people, and no longer speaking for them. Once the poster children for porcelain-skinned druggy excess, they’re now the embattled survivors sharing cautionary tales of bad decisions and dreams unfulfilled. Night Thoughts is framed by the opening "When You Are Young" and its late-album echo "When You Were Young"—shore-crashing surges of symphonic psychedelia that dissipate into Anderson’s rueful ruminations about the idealism of youth and the impossibility of recapturing it. While the album’s title may hint at seedy suggestion, Night Thoughts is more about those traumatic, sleep-depriving memories that have you tossing and turning and "tumbling out of a single bed."
It’s a record about addiction, to be sure, but to an intoxicant more elusive, potent, and damaging than any street drug: desire. And like any stimulant, the highs are ecstatic (see: "Outsiders," a stained-sheet celebration of odd-couple consummation, or the nostalgically trashy "Like Kids") and the lows are crushing (see: pretty much everything else). The titles tell you exactly what you’re getting yourself into—"I Don’t Know How to Reach You," "What I’m Trying to Tell You," "Tightrope," "I Can’t Give Her What She Wants"—each song more desperate and depraved than the one before, culminating in the latter’s intimations of violence ("The keys are falling from her coat/ As I weave my fingers around her perfumed throat"). Though a master of evocative detail, Anderson doesn't care much for narrative exposition—rather than set a scene, he prefers to thrust you into the thick of the moment where it’s all about to fall apart. And depending on your disposition, Night Thoughts concludes with either with a happy ending, or a dispiriting one. The swashbuckling, orchestro-ballad finale, "The Fur & the Feathers," finds Anderson valorizing "the thrill of the chase"—an optimistic suggestion that even the most bitter, agonizing breakup can’t diminish the rush of romance, or the brazen affirmation of a damaging, heart-ravaging habit that’ll inevitably lead to more sleepless nights. For the sake of Suede’s ongoing renaissance, let’s hope it’s the latter.
http://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/214 ... -thoughts/
sunshine
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Re: Night Thoughts promotion/reviews

Post by sunshine »

January 21, 2016
Review: Suede’s Grandiose and Chilling ‘Night Thoughts’ Keep Them Awake
8
SPIN Rating: 8 of 10
Release Date: February 5, 2016
Label: Warner Music Group
Rachel Brodsky
The mark of a successful relationship is if its parties can evolve together. Britpop luminaries Suede proved theirs could be built to last when they reunited after a decade apart for Bloodsports in 2013, and lord knows they faced challenges during their ’90s heyday: industry pressure, member turnover (founding guitarist Bernard Butler acrimoniously left after 1994’s Dog Man Star), a frustrating name change (a lounge singer’s early ’90s lawsuit forced them to be billed as “The London Suede” in the U.S.), rampant drug abuse, and, ultimately, burnout. But breaks can lead to happy reunions, and on their second album post-comeback, Night Thoughts, the glam-rock revivalists again sound physically rejuvenated despite carrying an emotional albatross.
As with the sober but no less adventurous Bloodsports, the band’s seventh studio effort cares little for ’90s nostalgia. That’s on purpose; frontman Brett Anderson, who takes after the proudly alienesque David Bowie in his unabashed lack of conformity, has emphasized their wish to shuck off their implicit Clinton-era tidings before, with him telling Under the Radar a few years back, “I think Bloodsports could be the first stage of a creative rejuvenation of the band. Not just us jumping up onstage and playing songs from 20 years ago. Actually making new music.”
They certainly could’ve taken up a Britpop mantle in the early-’90s if they’d wanted. Described by Melody Maker in 1992 as “The Best New Band in Britain,” Suede laid the groundwork for Blur, Pulp, Placebo, and a host of others, but they had little interest in belonging to a burgeoning Britpop fraternity. So they relaunched with the seminal Dog Man Star — a murky, highly orchestrated, and experimental record whose fraught creation put them on the critical map but ultimately ended Anderson and Butler’s relationship (they would later rejoin for the frontman’s solo projects). But, like their forebears in T. Rex and Bowie himself, they do care about authentic self-expression and putting on a show.
So Night Thoughts honors Suede’s longstanding place in Brit-rock history as theatrical brooders with a penchant for pop and post-punk, while also celebrating the five-piece’s growth by supplying listeners with another round of swirling dance ballads (the gloomy, arena-filling “Outsiders” and the twinkling “No Tomorrow”) and operatic, Dog Man Star-ry ruminations (“Tightrope”).
But their priorities have clearly shifted. Instead of boozy-sloppy titles like “Trash” and “Lazy,” the self-anointed band of outsiders again let go of their narcotized past (Anderson has spoken openly about his addiction struggles with cocaine, crack, and heroin) and pour their energies into, well, stability and growth. New-ish father Anderson has said that Night Thoughts is about being a parent and revisiting your own childhood, and sings of the stuff that literally keeps a fortysomething up at night: facing your inadequacy and losing people you love — or, more specifically, losing your children. “Like Kids” and album opener “When You Are Young” come accented with samples of clamoring tykes and words of invincibility (“Oh, it belongs to us / Oh, there’s nothing we can’t reach”). On the jaunty, Blur-like “What I’m Trying to Tell You,” Anderson sounds like every parent who’s questioned their ability to keep their children safe when he sings, “I don’t know the meaning of much / I don’t know the right expressions / I don’t have too much intuition or too many credentials.”
At times, the darker, more anxious songs risk creating too long of a lull in Night Thoughts: It could stand to lose either the slow-churning “Learning to Be” or the overly dramatic “I Can’t Give Her What She Wants.” But for the most part Night Thoughts snaps the listener awake with thought-provoking contrasts of exuberant youth and limitless possibilities (“Outsiders,” “No Tomorrow”) and broken adult relationships (“I Don’t Know How to Reach You”).
Anderson’s nightly concerns might have changed with the inevitable passing of time, and Suede’s orchestrations might lean more toward opera these days, but his remarkable delivery hasn’t waned since their tight ’90s run. For all of its pomp and circumstance, Night Thoughts doesn’t shy away from pop — in fact Anderson uses it to soundtrack the earlier, more innocent chapters of his life (“Fight the sorrow like there’s no tomorrow”), saving a swell of climactic strings and a twinge of moody guitar to underscore the myriad ways he could lose everything (“When the wolf is at your door / Your child’s against your breast”). It’s the sort of doomsday scenario a therapist would advise troubled insomniacs to write out on paper. Fortunately for longtime (and brand-new) fans, Anderson already has.
http://www.spin.com/2016/01/review-sued ... -thoughts/
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Re: Night Thoughts promotion/reviews

Post by sunshine »

Jan 21, 2016
Suede - Night Thoughts: refashioned into a less predictable beast
Tony Clayton-Lea
Album: Night Thoughts
Artist: Suede
Label: Suede Ltd/Warners
Genre: Alternative
There have been many of David Bowie’s creative bastard offspring doing the rounds over the past two weeks, but Suede fit the bill better than most.
What is perhaps more nourishing a thought is that the Suede we knew of 20-odd years ago has been refashioned into a less predictable beast – no longer does lead singer Brett Anderson sing of furtive drug-taking in gasoline-stink alleys or sleazy sex on council estates.
Rather, as the title implies, this sees Anderson mull over those dusk to dawn ruminations of a man of a certain age who is wondering what on earth he’s doing and how long he’s got left to do it.
The music rattles along at speed – songs such as Like Kids and I Don’t Know How To Reach You channel classic-era quality, while closing track The Fur And The Feathers is a flamboyant ballad to beat them all.
http://www.irishtimes.com/culture/music ... -1.2505486
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Re: Night Thoughts promotion/reviews

Post by sunshine »

21 janvier 2016
Date de sortie : 22.01.2016
Label : Warner Music
Jean Duffour
Depuis leur reformation en 2010, Suede ne cessent de surprendre, dans le bon sens du terme. Le très réussi Bloodsports augurait d’un retour avec les formes et mûrement réfléchi. Night Thoughts, leur septième album studio, confirme la tendance. Suede reviennent en grande forme, pour poursuivre la révolution qu’ils avaient entamé Outre-Manche au début des années 1990. A l’heure où la scène Brit-Pop apparaît en bout de course, ce nouvel album est bel et bien une aubaine.
La bande de Brett Anderson n’a pas chômé durant les trois ans qui séparent leurs deux dernières sorties. A cet égard d’ailleurs, un long métrage du même nom doit accompagner la venue de Night Thoughts. Roger Sargent, le réalisateur, décrit le lien entre le film et l’album, par le fait que ce dernier traite de thèmes courants et familiers comme la vie, la mort, l’amour ou encore l’angoisse. Autant d’éléments qu’il a souhaité développer à travers une étude psychologique de l’humain.
Le single Outsiders aux guitares rutilantes avait laissé une excellente première impression, et décuplé l’attente. Le génie brutal et pop, les vocalises sublimes de Bret Anderson et les mélodies rugueuses, tout Suede se retrouve au sein de cet excellente chanson. Et le reste de l’album se place dans la continuité.
Cela pourrait être un reproche, mais c’est en réalité une force : Suede ont fait du Suede. Et du très bon. Revenant aux sources de sa gloire, aux riffs frénétiques de Coming Up, aux sonorités grinçantes et aux envolées lyriques de Bret, cet album se place incontestablement parmi les meilleurs du groupe anglais.
Poussant le génie un peu plus loin, le quintet s’est même offert le luxe de signer des arrangements et une production proches de la perfection. Le meilleur exemple sur ce point, n’est autre que la chanson Like Kids où les choeurs d’enfants apportent une touche magistrale à la mélancolie ambiante. Si l’idée n’a rien d’originale, elle est exécutée avec finesse. Le morceau en ressort sincère et touchant.
Combattant bien des préjugés à leur sujet, Suede sont en train de réaliser le come-back parfait. Et si l’âge ne faisait que bonifier le groupe de Brett Anderson ? Et si, surtout, Suede n’était pas un de ces groupes d’exception comme on en côtoie trop rarement ? Deux interrogations auxquelles Night Thoughts apporte des éléments de réponse. La nuit porte (bon) conseil.
http://www.soundofviolence.net/articles ... ughts.html
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Re: Night Thoughts promotion/reviews

Post by sunshine »

21 janvier 2016
Date de sortie : 22.01.2016
Label : Warner Music
Jean Duffour
Depuis leur reformation en 2010, Suede ne cessent de surprendre, dans le bon sens du terme. Le très réussi Bloodsports augurait d’un retour avec les formes et mûrement réfléchi. Night Thoughts, leur septième album studio, confirme la tendance. Suede reviennent en grande forme, pour poursuivre la révolution qu’ils avaient entamé Outre-Manche au début des années 1990. A l’heure où la scène Brit-Pop apparaît en bout de course, ce nouvel album est bel et bien une aubaine.
La bande de Brett Anderson n’a pas chômé durant les trois ans qui séparent leurs deux dernières sorties. A cet égard d’ailleurs, un long métrage du même nom doit accompagner la venue de Night Thoughts. Roger Sargent, le réalisateur, décrit le lien entre le film et l’album, par le fait que ce dernier traite de thèmes courants et familiers comme la vie, la mort, l’amour ou encore l’angoisse. Autant d’éléments qu’il a souhaité développer à travers une étude psychologique de l’humain.
Le single Outsiders aux guitares rutilantes avait laissé une excellente première impression, et décuplé l’attente. Le génie brutal et pop, les vocalises sublimes de Bret Anderson et les mélodies rugueuses, tout Suede se retrouve au sein de cet excellente chanson. Et le reste de l’album se place dans la continuité.
Cela pourrait être un reproche, mais c’est en réalité une force : Suede ont fait du Suede. Et du très bon. Revenant aux sources de sa gloire, aux riffs frénétiques de Coming Up, aux sonorités grinçantes et aux envolées lyriques de Bret, cet album se place incontestablement parmi les meilleurs du groupe anglais.
Poussant le génie un peu plus loin, le quintet s’est même offert le luxe de signer des arrangements et une production proches de la perfection. Le meilleur exemple sur ce point, n’est autre que la chanson Like Kids où les choeurs d’enfants apportent une touche magistrale à la mélancolie ambiante. Si l’idée n’a rien d’originale, elle est exécutée avec finesse. Le morceau en ressort sincère et touchant.
Combattant bien des préjugés à leur sujet, Suede sont en train de réaliser le come-back parfait. Et si l’âge ne faisait que bonifier le groupe de Brett Anderson ? Et si, surtout, Suede n’était pas un de ces groupes d’exception comme on en côtoie trop rarement ? Deux interrogations auxquelles Night Thoughts apporte des éléments de réponse. La nuit porte (bon) conseil.
http://www.soundofviolence.net/articles ... ughts.html
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Re: Night Thoughts promotion/reviews

Post by sunshine »

Jan 20, 2016
Suede: Night Thoughts
Cam Lindsay
Expectation when bands reform to release new material is often so low that it's almost in the artist's best interest to simply tour the hits. When Suede reunited in 2010, they had little interest in either fate, and even scrapped an album's worth of material because it wasn't good enough. In the end, they released Bloodsports, an album about "the endless carnal game of love" that was so surprisingly excellent, it rivalled the band's now classic first two albums.
Night Thoughts is their second album since the reunion, and seventh overall. Night Thoughts explores much darker terrain than the libidinous Bloodsports, focusing on morbid themes such as aging and decaying, both physically and emotionally. The band opt for stark minimalism to deliver the most elegiac moments: The emotion flowing through the pained lyrics of "Pale Snow" is underpinned by ambient textures, while Brett Anderson's remorseful words in "I Can't Give Her What She Wants" are lifted by Richard Oakes' delicate, cascading guitar lines. And yet, despite Anderson's stated desire to make a cohesive statement this time around, Suede have slipped in a few tracks that stand apart: first single "Outsiders" blisters with an aggressive riff by Oakes and Anderson's soaring chorus, while the giddy "No Tomorrow" and "Like Kids" come from the same pop-fuelled mindset as 1996's Coming Up.
Night Thoughts is successful in accomplishing its goal, though. Book-ended by "When You Are Going" and "The Fur & The Feathers," Suede establish and uphold the album's gravitas with the type of symphonic grandiosity we've come to anticipate from them. That everything in between falls into place accordingly demonstrates Suede are just as exciting now as they were 20 years ago. (Warner)
http://exclaim.ca/music/article/suede-night_thoughts
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Re: Night Thoughts promotion/reviews

Post by sunshine »

January 22, 2016
Night Thoughts
Night Thoughts|Suede|Suede Ltd.
By Ashley Zlatopolsky
Britpop innovators return with their strongest work in decades
It's been nearly a quarter of a century since Suede introduced Brit-pop to the world on a 1992 Melody Maker cover that dubbed them "the best new band in Britain." The London outfit went on to release a series of U.K. chart-toppers, only to fall victim to changing tastes toward the end of the Nineties; by the end of the seven-year hiatus that followed, pop culture had all but forgotten about one of the previous decade's most essential alt-glam acts. After Night Thoughts, however, no one will forget Suede: It's their most cohesive album to date, putting a decisively modern twist on their definitive Brit-pop.
Over the years, Suede's lyrical concerns have ranged from bad sex and sordid drug use to the mundane trials of parenthood. In 2016, the band tackles tough and intimate topics like existentialism, love and mortality with a fearlessness that feels more rock & roll than ever. They've even gone as far as conceptualizing their music into a feature film directed by photographer Roger Sargent. The film, which is being released along with the LP, combines realism with surrealism in a story about the day-to-day struggle of keeping one's head above water (quite literal in a series of ocean scenes).
True to its title, Night Thoughts is about the fears and doubts that keep Suede up at night. The vulnerable human psyche takes center stage as singer Brett Anderson brings alienation, death and uncertainty (see the evocative "No Tomorrow") to vivid life. Throughout, Anderson keeps his emotions set to high, with every breath between words accentuated for a maximum gut-punch feeling. The swirls and echoes of reverb-laden guitar and a full string session only make the words hit harder. On "I Don't Know How to Reach You," a sterling example of Anderson's wide-ranging vocals, he cries: "Tell me the things that scare you, touch me with terror's flame, fill me with hesitation – again." It's a moment of peak drama on Suede's realest, most human effort yet.
http://www.rollingstone.com/music/album ... s-20160122
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Re: Night Thoughts promotion/reviews

Post by sunshine »

24 January 2016
Suede: Night Thoughts review – older, wiser, deeper
4 / 5 stars
(Warner Bros/Suede Ltd)
Kitty Empire
In January 2013, Suede returned from their 13-year hiatus with the announcement of an album, Bloodsports. The news was eclipsed somewhat by another comeback album – The Next Day by David Bowie, the artist’s first in a decade.
Fast forward three years, and here poor Suede are again – another album, another overshadowing, blacker than the first. For Suede, there is no escaping Bowie, whose album-cum-death two weeks ago knocked most other musical activity into a cocked hat. Singer Brett Anderson has riffed on Bowie’s vocal style, to the glamorous, seedy, outsider personae Bowie created, since the band’s beginnings. Listening to Night Thoughts, the main downside of this seventh Suede album is that it is an album by an indie rock band heavily influenced by Bowie, but not enough by Bowie’s searching spirit and latterday musical courage.
Otherwise, Night Thoughts is just grand – an unexpectedly poignant and cinematic record from a band who are enjoying a fruitful second life. Bloodsports found the band comprehensively reinvigorated, if still playing on well-rubbed Suede textures – lust, the thrill of the chase. Night Thoughts is even better; deeper, more candid, more vulnerable. There are still tracks called things like The Fur and the Feathers and Outsiders, perhaps the most Suedey of Suede song titles.
Outsiders... ‘perhaps the most Suedey of Suede song titles’. But Anderson has talked about viewing his younger self through the prism of his older self here, his relationship with his father through his own fatherhood. And so Night Thoughts finds Anderson fretting and regretting at the darkest, most yin hour of the clock. Tightrope is full of fear, but not the kind that is half-thrill.
There is a string section – often the last refuge of the pedestrian indie band trying to sound grandiose – but here, Suede pull it off, and it brings lashings of romance to Anderson’s angst. Every passage of guitar band music is more ruminative than of old, balanced out by something a little more imaginative, such as the stately string intro to When You Are Young, later reprised as When You Were Young.
The excellent What I Am Trying to Tell You is a list of Anderson’s personal failings, whose soured glam shimmy sounds like the arrogant Suede in their pomp, but with a much higher emotional intelligence score. I Can’t Give Her What She Wants packs in more self-flagellation, undercut with something more sinister, as Anderson’s protagonist regards the woman he is singing about with intriguing ambivalence.
Youth – a key ingredient in Suede’s lubricous dramas, all “battle plans and distant drums” – is gone. The overblown exaggerations of greenhorns has been replaced by a twilit dread based on lived mistakes and real perdition.
The dark nights of the soul only get darker with time, and Night Thoughts proves an unexpectedly congenial companion volume.
http://www.theguardian.com/music/2016/j ... able-grand
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Re: Night Thoughts promotion/reviews

Post by sunshine »

24 Jan 2016
Suede - Night Thoughts
Beginning with the deep resonant bowing of a dusty cello and viola, the cinematic sweep of Suede's seventh album Night Thoughts is apparent from the opening bars. 'When You Are Young's pairing of guitars with epic strings and rat-a-tat-tat militaristic drumming, alongside Brett Anderson's distinctive high octave vocal, gets me thinking of a couple of unusual reference points I wouldn't normally associate with Britpop's kings of trash and glamour. Yes: I'm thinking of those 70s prog-rockers with their string-heavy Time And A Word album and also fellow 90s stalwarts Mansun, when they went bonkers prog on their second album Six. These thoughts are not entirely unfounded, I wouldn't go so far as to back the Telegraph's hyperbolic suggestion that Suede have reinvented the album, but they've certainly gone some way towards reinventing Suede. Of course they haven't gone off on any wild jazzy interludes or five minute guitar solos but, whilst staying true to their blueprint, they've managed to expand the universe of what a Suede album can be. This is a concept album, of sorts, designed to be performed alongside a specially commissioned feature length film by Roger Sergeant. I've not seen the bleak visuals that tell the tale of a drowning man as he looks back over his life and the mistakes that led to his suicide so I will have to judge the album on its own merits. It helps that, although the themes and emotional judder are complimentary, the album and film are not exactly mutually exclusive. There isn't an obvious narrative arc to the songs but there are devices that help to hold things together, like the brief reprise of 'When You Are Young' remodelled as 'When You Were Young' as the albums penultimate piece. The soaring strings return with added flourish before stripping back to stark piano and a dramatic vocal for a final, darker verse.
Earlier on 'Outsiders' fits more obviously into the Suede canon, becoming an obvious promotional single. It has a soaring sing-a-long chorus, verses full of tension, edge and big layers of effects-laden jangly guitars. While it feels typical of the band it's also a touch more sophisticated, those strings (and they actually sound like Neil Codling's synth strings on this one) sound expensive, adding an extra loftiness to the chorus. In fact I would go so far as to say that long term collaborator Ed Buller's production on this album is some of his finest work, which goes a long way to helping the band realise their grand ambitions. Without pause the album hurtles head-first into 'No Tomorrow', which starts off sounding like The Who to my ears, before hitting a more typical verse. Brett Anderson's accent has always led to (often lazy) Bowie comparison's, but it's hard not to hear hints of 'Ashes To Ashes' here. The song begins to fade and the synthetic ambience of 'Pale Snow' rises to take it's place. This one strips things right down to vocal, guitar and ambience with an unusual arrangement and chord sequence that takes you on a twisting journey, pondering the tragedy of failed romances. At first I find Anderson's vocal a little over-blown for such an icy solemn piece, but it's a dark-night-of-the-soul, howling-at-the-moon moment, and the coda that follows shows off some truly tender delivery, as Brett sings, “And they always get away/ it never works out for me/ it never happens to me”.
'I Don't Know How To Reach You' brings back the drums, powerful and rock-steady, it has a soaring chorus and a wall of sound that barely lets up. Even when the rhythm track drops away the tension remains, powerful emotions turned up to 11 and frequencies filled by wide-angle synths. Six minutes of full-on desperation is actually a little exhausting, but there's a ray of hope towards the end as 'Pale Snow's “it never happens to me” is reprised, rejuvenated as a choral “I never thought it could happen to me”. 'What I'm Trying To Tell You' follows with a great plodding groove, although it does feel a little crowded at times. Perhaps there are one too many guitar parts in the verse, the chorus lifts, but it's not their strongest song and it is rescued somewhat by a 'la-la' laden outro that resembles the melody from classic Suede single 'Beautiful Ones'. 'Tightrope' starts off with an icy wind, it's a builder of a track, full of overblown emotion, the narrator and his lover working through the balancing-act trials of life. “Walking a tightrope with you/made my mistake when I slipped through the noose”, as the metaphorical tightrope becomes a tight rope around the neck when it all gets too much.
'Learning To Be' starts off with certain notes that wouldn't sound out of place on the soundtrack to Stephen Moffat's BBC Sherlock Holmes series'. It's an interlude track in a similar way to 'Pale Snow' hanging in the air, ponderous and unresolved. It is followed appropriately by 'Like Kids', one of the most up-beat moments on the album and another moment of classic Suede, propelled along by an appropriately youthful beat and razor sharp guitar hooks. The song ends abruptly with a choir of school kids singing the guitar hook absurdly, like it's a playground tease: 'ner-ner ne ner-ner' blowing a defiant raspberry. 'I can't Give Her What She Wants' sinks us back into the all pervading mire that characterises this collection of songs, hanging in the background even during the most triumphant moments. This track has a lot of space, which makes it stand out, as the album overall could benefit in places from slightly sparser arrangement. I'm sure I'm not the first person to notice a similarity to the folkier parts of 'Stairway To Heaven' in this track, it's another example of Suede flirting at the edges of 70s progressive rock, without surrendering to it or sounding cliche. Richard Oakes' guitar solo here is a real treat, understated and set against a near empty backdrop, it's an old fashioned device but it works and the guitar tone they found is glorious.
'The Fur And The Feathers' is a truly epic close to an album that is already grandiose and cinematic. It's got that same creepy dark tension that Suede often favour and for the most part works as a piano ballad, coupled with high pitch-shifted guitar licks. The cymbal crashes of the chorus sound positively orchestral, there's even a hint of Bond to the turn around at the end of the chorus. You're waiting and waiting for the beat to come in and when it finally hits there's more of a major, positive feel than you might expect, showing that, despite the implied tragedy throughout the album there is a certain joy to 'the thrill of the chase'. Anderson's pensive, maudlin character is satisfied by at least having lived a life and tried, no matter how it ended up. It's a strange sort of happiness to end such an intense album, that is so often bleak, but a strangely fitting one for Suede. They were the band of youth in their heyday and now they are middle aged. They were associated so closely with all that trashy, drug-addled glamour and danger in the 90s but now they are dignified, classy and parents to boot! They were the band who blew it all, lost their muse and faded from view, but now they are a band that has triumphed with a career high, an ambitious artistic expression and potentially their most cohesive work to date. If you were put off in the past by Brett's 'marmite' vocal, or the intense emotions and dense arrangements of their previous work, you're not likely to find sudden and unexpected love for Night Thoughts, but if you've ever been fond of The London Suede this certainly finds them at their very best.
Adam Kidd
http://www.brightonsfinest.com/html/ind ... t-thoughts
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Re: Night Thoughts promotion/reviews

Post by sunshine »

January 21, 2016
hmv.com talks to... -
“We wanted to do something that was less immediate, something a little bit more challenging…” hmv.com talks to Suede
by James
Although they rose to fame in the Britpop ere of the 1990s, Suede reformed in 2012 to release their comeback album, Bloodsports, a record that recalled the best of their 90s heyday, but for their new album, Night Thoughts, they’ve done something very different, making a record that's designed to be listened to as a whole and even commissioning a film as a companion piece to the music.
We sat down with bassist Mat Osman to talk about why they’ve taken this route, how they ended up with an entire film instead of music videos and what you can expect from their all-new live show…
Your new album Night Thoughts is out on Friday, it's been about three years since Bloodsports, what have you all been up to in the meantime? Has it been solid touring?
“No, we toured for about a year, but after that we started working on the new record. It takes us a long time nowadays, I think as you get older and you have more albums under your belt, finding an interesting place to go without repeating yourself becomes more difficult. We actually finished it a year ago.”
So what’s been happening in the meantime? Why the long wait?
“Well, right from the start we’d wanted to make something that would get listened to in one go, something that kind of ebbed and flowed. So we got to that point and then when we started talking about videos, it seemed to kind of spoil the whole idea, it went against everything we’d tried to do. So then the idea of doing a film came up and that added another 6 months onto it. Then it was going to come out at Christmas and we thought ‘actually, it’s really not a very Christmassy record.’ So, January it is!”
Including the film then, how long has it taken to put all of it together?
“All in all, it’s been about two years. It’s weird. We went off to Belgium and recorded about a whole album’s worth of just music, which we’ve never really done before. I mean we didn’t have any songs or anything, we just recorded about 50 minutes of music and then gave it all to Brett (Anderson, singer) to turn it into songs.
“So that accounts for about half of Night Thoughts, then we came back and worked at Sarm West studios in London, where we did some more conventional kind of songs. After that, Neil spent a lot of time locked away in his attic trying to create something out of it all that flows properly.”
We’ll come back to the film that accompanies the album in a minute, but generally speaking, how have you found making this record compared to Bloodsports? Brett's been quoted as saying that was your hardest album to make, would you agree?
“Er, they’re all hard, haha! But yeah, totally, I mean that was our ‘comeback record’, and most bands’ comeback records are usually not very good. I mean there’s something really seductive about the idea of coming back, you play your best songs live for a year and you tend to start thinking ‘well, this is easy. All we have to do is write 12 songs as good as them and we’re laughing’. And you kind of forget that it’s taken 20 years just to kick those songs into shape!
“So that was a really long process, just learning to be Suede again. Learning to have high standards and deciding that we only want to release stuff that’s at least as good as what we’ve already done. This one was a bit different though because we knew we’d be doing something very different. We wanted to do something that was less immediate, something a little bit more challenging. It’s a real balancing act, I can’t stand self-indulgence in music, but at the same time we were trying to make something that was a bit more immersive, so it did take a long time to find something that fitted in the right way.”
So the whole writing process has been totally new to you this time?
“Yeah, exactly. We’ve never started just with music before, normally we’d sit there in one of our bedrooms and just bash away at the songs until they’re ready. With this, there are quite a lot of tracks that are just pieces of music that take you from one song to another, so it’s been a very different way of working.”
You've worked with Ed Buller again on this record, he seems to be your producer of choice. What makes him such a good fit for you?
“Lots of things. High standards. He was there when we recorded the early albums and songs like ‘Trash’, so he knows what we can do and he’s really not afraid to say ‘this isn’t good enough’. And he’s not just a hired hand, he’s just as tied up in it as we are, he’s not just there for the money – ‘cause we hardly pay him! He’s a member if the band while we’re making a record, really.
“Also, with this album, because we were talking a lot about film music and the way you have themes that appear throughout, his insight was useful because he works in film music when he’s not doing production. He’s really at home with all that, so doing that stuff on a record wasn’t pretentious to him because that’s the way he’s used to working.”
Can you tell us a bit about the concept behind the film that accompanies Night Thoughts?
“Yeah, I think one of the reasons we did this is just because we’re kind of crap at making videos. It’s always so depressing, they cost loads of money and we never feel like they’re any good. Especially for this record, which didn’t feel like it was lots of radio-friendly singles, so we just thought that if we’re going to have something visual then we should do something that has as much substance as the record. We thought ‘let’s not waste our money making three adverts, let’s spend it on a piece of art.’
“So we talked to a few people about ideas for a film as a companion piece to the album. We were really clear that we didn’t want it to slavishly follow the record, because there’s not really a narrative to the album or anything like that. But we wanted someone who could take the themes of the record and make something from it."
So Roger Sargent ended up directing the film – how did he get involved?
“As soon as Roger heard what we wanted to do, even before he’d heard the album, he had this idea of a really dark family drama. He had places that he wanted to shoot it and he just had this very clear idea of how he thought it should look, it has this very kitchen sink, British, working class kind of feel to it, the kind of thing you never really see on film. It all just felt very Suede. I mean we’ve known Roger for years, but from the very first meeting it felt like he really got what we were trying to do.”
“He’d just sort of been around for ages, he first started taking pictures of us at Glastonbury in 1994 I think, so we’ve known him for a long time and he did some photos for Bloodsports as well. But I’ve followed his video career with interest because he has this very unique style. I think we were always quite jealous of the videos he did for people like Fat White Family, we kept saying ‘this is what we should have been doing!’ So it was a chance to take that and expand on it.”
How involved have you guys been with that side of things?
“We’ve tried not to be too involved at all. We’re not filmmakers and I can’t think anything worse than us making a vanity piece. We told him what the record was about and he came back with a really detailed storyline. We went through it with him and there were a couple of points where we said ‘we don’t think this works with the record’, and there were others where we said that and he’d go ‘no, trust me, it’ll work’, so at that point we would say ‘ok, it’s your film’.
“I went down a couple of times while it was being shot and we talked through a few things, but it’s Roger’s film, we wanted to be very clear about that. We didn’t want a kind of puppet director.”
What does this all mean for the live shows? Will the film be a part of that?
“Yeah, we’ve played it out twice already, we did a show at the Roundhouse in November. What we ended up doing is having this huge screen showing the film, and we’re playing behind it. It’s an idea our lighting director had, for the first two songs you’re not totally sure if we’re even in the building, but hen he starts lighting us from behind, so you see us through the screen. It’s a really interesting effect - it’s quite something. We had no idea whether it was going to work until the dress rehearsal the night before we did it, so we were like ‘well, if it doesn’t we’re absolutely fucked’.
“It’s very un-Suede, we’re usually all about that connection with the audience, so it’s quite static and makes everything quite quiet, but I really like it, it’s a strange sideways step for us.”
http://www.hmv.com/music/-we-wanted-to- ... s-to-suede
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Re: Night Thoughts promotion/reviews

Post by sunshine »

January 25, 2016
Album review: Night Thoughts points to new era of adoration for Suede
Nick March
Four stars
When Suede released their self-­titled debut album in 1993, Brett Anderson, the band’s supremely talented frontman, and Bernard Butler, the lead guitarist, were hailed as creative powerhouses who would surely go on to define a generation of British music with their brand of ­brittle-but-intense alternative rock.
That idea would ultimately prove to be a false prophecy, as Suede found themselves overrun by the altogether more laddish Britpop eruption led by Oasis. Worse was to follow: Butler walked out in 1994, Suede’s early promise withered on the vine, and the band split in 2003.
Now they are back – albeit still without Butler – with a second album of new material in three years.
Night Thoughts – which follows well-received 2013 release Bloodsports – stays true to the classic Suede sound, marrying expansive and intricate guitar work with Anderson’s evocative and exquisite lyrical vignettes, which grub around somewhere between glam and the gutter.
Twenty years ago, Anderson was singing about alienation, fast living and the thrill of the chase. Somehow, the 21st-­century Anderson, ably supported on songwriting duties by Neil Codling and Richard Oakes, manages to stay close to many of those same themes without seeming like a man living an existence at odds with his years.
His world is still one of fragile beauty, his life still seemingly in the balance – it is no surprise to find Night Thoughts littered with song titles such as Outsiders, No Tomorrow, Tightrope and I Can’t Give Her What She Wants – even as he wrestles with his transformation from party-loving poet to happily married family man.
The aching for that previous life – or perhaps the concern about what is to come – is still front and centre.
On When You Are Young, Anderson talks of “battle plans and distant drums” and of there being “nothing right and nothing wrong” – but this nostalgia is wedded to a sense of understanding that the bravado of youth often gives way to a more stinging sense of self-awareness in middle age.
“I don’t know the meaning of much, I don’t know the right expressions, I don’t have too much intuition or too many credentials”, he laments on What I’m Trying to Tell You.
There is an inherent danger in comebacks, particularly after a long absence, something that Anderson has acknowledged in recent interviews. Too many bands return with an approximation of their previous sound without any sense that the world might have moved on in their ­absence.
Night Thoughts treads a more delicate path, offering enough to existing fans to keep them satisfied, while presenting a set of dark but enchanting songs that point to a new era of adoration for Suede.
http://www.thenational.ae/arts-life/mus ... -for-suede
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