Suede
The Blue Hour
Release Date: Sep 21, 2018
Genre(s): Pop/Rock
Record label: Rhino
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Album Review: The Blue Hour by Suede
Great, Based on 10 Critics
Based on rating 8/10
Back in the old days, the dim and distant Nineties, Suede albums always reacted against each other. The slutty, sultry art-glam of their eponymous debut was followed by their great, balladeering epic Dog Man Star. Coming Up stopped crying, sharpened its eyeliner and went on a stompy, T.Rex bender, Head Music decided to stop being so brash and lean into moodier, cleverer spaces and A New Morning just wanted to clear its head and breathe (with admittedly mixed results).
Based on rating 4/5
Scrappers to the last, Suede have often thrived with something to fight against, be it departing band members, doubters, or the dark days of the early 00s, when their brash live form railed against sliding public interest. Yet eight years into their reunion, fans might ask: what is left to fight now? If one response is the thickening of once free-flowing creative juices with age, it's a scrap Suede win with passion and drama on their eighth album. Rising to the weights of midlife responsibility and dread, Suede have reasserted and reinvented themselves gloriously: after the melodic punch of 2013's Bloodsports and the high-concept self-laceration of 2016's Night Thoughts, The Blue Hour reaches fresh turf with a show of ambition not quite tapped in Suede-world since Dog Man Star.
Based on rating 4
Turn back the clock 25 years, and for a brief period, sandwiched between the twin behemoths of grunge and Britpop, Suede were the most popular, critically acclaimed band in the UK. Their deft, androgynous blend of glam rock and Morrissey-indebted indie angst helped make their eponymous 1993 debut the fastest selling first album in British history, and even in the mid-’90s, with the Blur/Oasis-led Britpop juggernaut at full speed, the Londoners repeated the feat with the hit-packed Coming Up. But their ongoing personnel issues, including singer Brett Anderson's crack addiction, eventually caught up with them, and Suede went on indefinite hiatus in 2003.
Based on rating 7/10
Having established that their 21st century reunion was not a passing thing, Suede decided to stretch themselves with The Blue Hour, the third record they've made since reuniting in 2013. Unlike that year's Bloodsports or its 2016 sequel Night Thoughts, The Blue Hour isn't produced by Ed Buller, who helmed their three big records of the 1990s (Suede, Dog Man Star, Coming Up), it's the work of Alan Moulder, the veteran producer whose fingerprints were all over alternative rock of the '90s that had little to do with Brit-pop. Truth be told, Suede always stood slightly apart from the Brit-pop pack, sounding a little too louche and glamorous to be part of it, but this decadent romanticism also serves them well in middle age, as it offers avenues for exploration and reflection -- avenues that the band seize here.
Based on rating 7/10
With a pair of well-received, commercially viable albums in the shape of 2013's Bloodsports and 2015's Night Thoughts, London's often overlooked glam antidote to Britpop have turned what looked like a brief and beautiful comeback into an ongoing concern. On The Blue Hour, vocalist Brett Anderson unashamedly leads his band through epic orchestral peaks, chanted drone, fan-servicing delves into the glittering gutter and, of course, a handful of sleek, sweeping tunes that explode with drama and romantic tension with uneven but bold results. Far-removed from their early '90s halcyon days when Anderson's glorious androgyny and ex-guitarist Bernard Butler's riffing heroism separated them from the pack, Suede now find themselves mature, measured, and accomplished.
Based on rating 3/5
On their eighth album, Brett Anderson and co. take the road less travelled, exploring rural decay with cinematic lushness "Today I found a dead bird," sings Brett Anderson on this album’s Scott Walker-esque centre-piece, 'Roadkill'. Poor bloody bird, with its "brittle bones like snapped twigs / Savaged by the tyres and tossed in the tar / Broken in the English dirt / A carcass for the carrying crow".
Opinion: Excellent
At a recent album launch gig for The Blue Hour, Suede made the bravura decision to play only songs from their most recent three albums, all released since their emphatic comeback in 2010. If those initial reformation gigs exorcised some of the demons that saw the strange decline of the band in the late 90s, the albums Bloodsports and Night Thoughts were proof that they had much more to say. Now that accidental trilogy comes to a close with The Blue Hour, an album that ought to be regarded as a creative peak for Suede, easily reaching the heights of their 90s best.
Opinion: Excellent
A n artistic escape to the country risks an aesthetic shift to twee meditations on the joys of wood-burning stoves and sloe picking. However, that was never likely to happen to Brett Anderson of Suede, that most darkly urban of 90s indie groups, who left London for rural Somerset shortly before beginning work on The Blue Hour, his band's eighth album. As gothic and grand as their 1994 masterpiece Dog Man Star, this is possibly the only mainstream album you'll hear this year with a massed chorus of monks and spoken-word vignettes, including one about the band's singer digging up a corpse in the garden with his son.
Opinion: Excellent
After Suede 3.0 cemented their presence with 2013's 'Bloodsports', a record which took 1996's 'Coming Up' as its blueprint, it was 2016's 'Night Thoughts' which confirmed there were still plenty of suburban miles left to travel with gasoline in the tank. A darker, orchestral meditation on addiction which arrived with an accompanying film, it marked a further evolution of the band's sound that reaches its crescendo with 'The Blue Hour'. While unashamedly theatrical at points, such as opener 'As One' and the spoken-word 'Roadkill' which surely nods to Bowie's 'Future Legend', this album also contains some of Suede's most gloriously strident choruses in quite some time.
Opinion: Fairly Good
A fter marking their comeback from an 11-year hiatus with 2013's perfectly good but unsurprising Bloodsports, Suede were rather more adventurous with 2016's cinematic Night Thoughts. The Blue Hour, their eighth album, takes that approach a step further. Intended to be listened to as a whole, rather than as 14 discrete songs, there's even a storyline loosely underpinning it.
'The Blue Hour'
is available now