Album Review: Suede, The Blue Hour

Suede seem to exist in a twilight world. One populated by young lovers reaching for the stars but never getting higher than the top floor of a council tenement

. Of small town dreamers fated to live lives unremarked and unremarkable. Forever slipping between the papered-over cracks. Life is fleeting and impermanent and happiness evades the grasp like a budgie escaping a cage.

At times the arrangements and orchestration take on the aspect of a rather bleak Broadway musical – a collaboration between Brecht and Rice. With Richard Oakes’ spangly chorused arpeggios and Brett Anderson’s soaring vocals, we are close to a formula. A winning one. Typically, verses teeter momentarily before lifting and exploding into choruses of Suedian grandeur. Yes there are a few Bowie traits, but they are just influences and not acts of devotion, so barely worth mentioning. Like I just did. With repeated references to children and dead birds, perhaps there’s a cycle of life/make hay while the sun shines theme going on here. Beats me – I just get off on the epic, doomed romanticism of Suede’s oeuvre.

I find it uplifting. Makes me want to don wings and leap off a cliff to see if I can fly to the sun. Don’t encourage me. From the massed satanic choir of ‘As One’ – which wouldn’t sound out of place in a Dario Argento film – through the brooding ‘Cold Hands’ and on to the prosaic-but-savage ‘Flytipping’, it’s vintage Suede, sprinkled with glitter and dust.

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