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.
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.
