Spare a thought for the lone wolf making his way through the post-Britpop hinterlands without the back-up of the pack. Ian Brown, Richard Ashcroft and now Brett Anderson; these guys seem doomed to roam the fringes of indie consciousness, forever questioned about halcyon days by cub reporters shiny-eyed with retro visions.
There are exceptions of course, Morrissey and Jarvis to name two. But Suede often seemed like history’s middlemen, a mercurial act who enjoyed a considerable flare of brilliance in the early ‘90s, and thereafter were regarded as the band who kept the seat warm for Oasis following the war of the Roses. When Anderson attempted to catch lightning a second time, rekindling the fires with old sparring partner Bernard Butler in The Tears in 2004, the response was peculiarly muted, and the world at large remained untroubled by Here Come The Tears.
Brett Anderson, understandably, sounds like the work of a world-weary man. The opening tune and lead off single ‘Love Is Dead’ is a disconsolate ballad somewhere between Lennon at his most spectral and Spectored, Pin-Ups era Bowie and Gene Pitney. It’s also rather lovely. So it goes: the string laden ‘One Lazy Morning’ is similarly woebegone and soul-searching (“Am I gonna find Jesus in me?”), while wintery tunes like ‘Scorpio Rising’ bear far more comparison with the Suede of ‘Saturday Night’ than ‘Animal Nitrate’.
There are occasional flashbacks mind, the Tony Visconti thud of ‘Dust And Rain’ for one, not to mention some cringeworthy drug-love imagery of the “I am the needle/You are the vein” variety. Anderson is at his best when he sounds his age, as in the careworn airs of ‘To The Winter’ and ‘Colour Of The Night’, and best of all, the long, languorous slow dances of ‘The Infinite Kiss’ and ‘The More We Possess The Less We Own Of Ourselves’, which suggest an elegant escape route into urban European baroque pop.
Neither tearaway maverick nor irrelevant abdicator, Brett Anderson sounds like a man out of time in a time out of joint. No bad thing, necessarily.