The Automatik

Independiente, 2005

It’s hard to believe that the first Suede album was released more than a decade ago. Brilliance, bickering, band members quitting, being forced to tack on “London” to the name, and singer Brett Anderson dyeing his hair blond ensued throughout their reign, so it’s perhaps harder to believe that a band that received overwhelming amounts of UK press hype went down a few years ago with barely a whisper.

But Here Come the Tears is not a Suede retrospective, although Suede fans rejoiced upon learning that singer Brett Anderson and guitarist Bernard Butler were discarding their well-documented animosity towards each other and forging a new alliance. Reviews have been typically laudatory and the band’s own website quips that, “the result is an astonishing wall of sound that at times feels like Spector producing the Spiders From Mars covering ?Bridge Over Troubled Water’, only bigger.”

But enough talk. What does the album sound like?

To say it sounds like Suede would be both inaccurate yet quite correct. Brett’s voice, while slightly ragged, remains quite amazing. Butler’s emotive guitar is there, too. But there’s something different about The Tears, and it’s not just that there are two non-Suede band members involved.

Although Suede was enormously popular and lyrically dealt with that typically British way of transforming the banal into the sublime, I always felt that they offered more depth than many other Britpop bands (with the obvious exception being Pulp). However, very little on The Tears’ debut approaches the mastery or beauty of anything on Dog Man Star or even Sci Fi Lullabies. In fact, both musically and lyrically, I feel that the album as a whole is (dare I say it) quite commercial and mainstream.

It’s not a bad album and in fact, I like it a lot. However, songs like “Imperfection” and “Beautiful Pain” are actually repetitive and mundane. I can’t help but think that “Ghost of You” would have been much more intriguing if the lover in question had been murdered by the narrator instead of just leaving him.

Here’s where it’s hard to distance Anderson and Butler from Suede: if this were six or seven years ago, the resulting collaboration would have been different, more fully-fledged, simply better. That’s not to say that The Tears’ glory days are behind them before they’ve begun, however.

“Refugees” is a remarkable single as is “Lovers” and the soaring background vocals of “Co-Star” are lovely. Even “The Asylum,” despite its quaint lyrics, is a good song. The dark and thrilling “Brave New Century” is better than almost anything on the Butler-less Head Music and definitely better than Butler’s solo material.

“Apollo 13″ is gorgeous, only marred in part by Brett’s peculiar mention of designer sheets, but “Love as Strong as Death” is grandiose, bittersweet, and incredible. If every song on The Tears album were this good, I might even forget that I ever heard Coming Up.