The Beat Surrender

Music can be a strange and fickle beast can’t it?

Look at how many times we hear that you can’t roll back the years and return to former glories, it’s said a lot and it’s said for a reason….because in the main it tends to be true. Once a band loses that important chemistry or creative spark it dies. It also doesn’t matter if it’s a slow death or it’s ripped apart at the seams straight away, the inevitable reunion tours when the money has run out further down the line will be an embarrassing shambles, shadows of their former strutting selves.

I have to say when I heard that Brett Anderson and Bernard Butler had kissed and made up recently and were set to record together again I was slightly torn. Part of me worried about the attempting to ‘go back’, part of me was excited about the prospect of two people who were responsible for two of my favourite albums of the last fifteen years working together again. So which is it to be lads?

Well rules are there to be broken and against a whole stack of odds it looks like Butler and Anderson have pulled it out of the fire with Here Come The Tears. From start to finish the album has a glow of real confidence about it, a long way from the sorry effort that was the last Suede album A New Morning. The most obvious difference is that Brett Anderson has rediscovered the voice that made him such a talent throughout the nineties. It no longer sounds ravaged, instead it shines throughout, up there vocally with anything he did on Dog Man Star or the eponymous debut. The second thing to hit you is the production. Bernard Butler is back and doing the knob twiddling alongside guitar and song-writing duties. It’s still a grand sound but he’s reigned things in to make the core of the song the focal point.

So how are the two of them getting on again after all the years of petulance that stopped them working together? The third track on the album is probably the biggest indicator. While it doesn’t say in the sleeve notes that it’s about the two of them, it might as well in the title and lyrics. Co-Star features lines like “Cos when we are together the world smiles, and when we’re together it feels right, we’ll live for the future and it’s scenes, when were together my co-star and me�. Things are looking rosy in camp Butler-Anderson and it shows in the music.

The opener Refugees would sit easily on the last decent Suede album Coming Up, it has that big chorus go on that made hits of songs like Trash and Beautiful Ones, it could well join them in being a top twenty track.

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