The London Suede's aquatic Night Thoughts

Album: Night Thoughts
Artist: The London Suede
Label: Rhino
Songs: (1) When You Are Young (2) Outsiders (3) No Tomorrow (4) Pale Snow (5) I Don’t Know How To Reach You (6) What I’m Trying To Tell You (7) Tightrope (8) Learning To Be (9) Like Kids (10) I Can’t Give Her What He Wants (11) When You Were Young (12) The Fur and the Feathers

Contractions and negatives in song titles — “Don’t Know,” “Can’t Give,” “What I’m Trying” — convey the anguish

Author

By Andrew Hamlin

Publish Date

July 29, 2016

Electronic reverb, reverbs, to the point where the studio itself suggests a cistern.

We won’t have the new Meat Loaf until the kids go back to school this September, so lucky for us the Suede decided to carry on in the face of lineup changes and, dare I say it, getting old, which happens to the best of us. The emotional urgency you cherish about the Loaf, sits here too. Electronic reverb, reverbs, to the point where the studio itself suggests a cistern. Love swirls always just out of reach. “The Fur and the Feathers” spells out how the singer’s settled for “the thrill of the chase,” the conflict, fuck the resolution; and while Deep Purple and Motörhead made similar cases in the past, they did so without so much reverb. So much dripping romanticism.

And dripping romanticism includes paralysis, futility. Contractions and negatives in song titles — “Don’t Know,” “Can’t Give,” “What I’m Trying” — convey the anguish, but lyrics don’t merely lie lame-duck. Within the reverb, guitars float and sting. Keyboards ping. A rich snare, spraying cymbals, hold these aquatic elements from floating away on their pushing currents. Singer Brett Anderson floats like the female faceless figure on the album cover, suspended in the rest of it, but convincing you he’s drowning until the next song snaps him back to life. He can narrate, but flail as he might, he cannot die.