After an absence of more than a decade, Suede returned to the music scene this Monday with their sixth studio album, Bloodsports. Thanks to a couple of cash-in collections and a short-lived but fruitful Anderson / Butler reconciliation that brought us the Tears, it doesn’t feel like eleven years have passed since the band’s last substantial offering, and, happily, it doesn’t sound like it either. Bloodsports quite intentionally lurks in the lacuna between the cinematic grandeur of Dog Man Star and the colourful kitsch of Coming Up, offering listeners a fat-free and apparently effortless resurrection of Suede at the height of their powers – radio-friendly, yes, but not at the expense of the deep and carnal themes that underpin almost every track.
Its opening song, “Barriers”, typifies this euphonious synthesis perhaps as well as any other. Brett Anderson’s still-soaring vocals (“Aniseed kisses and lipstick traces…”) are complemented by a mounting rock sound that, by the track’s end, has risen to the level of Steinman-esque grandeur that one would expect to find on a Killers album. It’s little wonder that the band gave this track away as a taster single, such is its lure. “Snowblind” maintains the momentum, not to mention the aniseed fixation, presenting a crisp, commercial – if a little anodyne, compared to the rest of the LP –sound that I would imagine will see it appear as a single before too long.
The album’s third track sets things spinning faster, as “It Starts and Ends with You” reminds us why Suede were one of the biggest singles bands of the 1990s. A delectable blend of lyrical inventiveness (“Like a hairline crack on a radiator, leaking life…”) and glorious cliché (“And I fall to the floor like my strings are cut…”) sit atop one of Richard Oakes’ finest guitar melodies, perhaps making Bloodsports’ first commercial single the group’s most memorable since 1996’s instantly-recognisable “Beautiful Ones”. It is followed by “Sabotage” – an edgy and experimental track that’s been built like a B-side, which in Suede’s case is more of a compliment that a criticism, particularly in an era where digital technology has effectively put paid to such outmoded pleasures. There was a time when the release of a new Suede single would amount to almost an album’s worth of new material if one purchased all its cross-media releases, and it was material that stood up against – and in a few cases, surpassed – the better-known A-sides and album tracks. “For the Strangers” is cut from similarly eerie cloth, and with all its talk of aerosol, “gutters and drains and bins” is every bit as redolent of Suede’s popular mid-’90s stuff. “Hit Me” is the imperative chosen to name Bloodsports’ sixth track, but in truth it’s the song that does all the hitting, setting itself up as a sure-fire future single with its guitar-driven aggression and lyrical spite.
However, it’s the album’s final four tracks that offer the listener the greatest reward, as is immediately evident from the opening refrain of “Sometimes I Feel I’ll Float Away”, which evokes the feel of A New Morning’s most beautiful and indulgent ballads, but with the raw hunger of “Animal Nitrate” instead of the extravagant metaphor of “Astrogirl”. “All the plans were made in the wooded glade,” Anderson sings. “Where your body was split wide open, and I count to ten as the race begins round your hairpin bends.” Brutal and honest.
“What Are You Not Telling Me?” continues the record’s rapid descent into off-kilter love song, as telephones’ “brittle sighs” and “blown-away dandelion clocks” segue into poetic musings on the mysteries of love – not the romantic, abstract mysteries of which the masses sing, but the day-to-day “little things that are tearing us up”. With a few more listens, this one has the potential to rival REM’s “The One I Love” as one of my favourite twisted love songs.
The penultimate offering, “Always”, is another prominent example of vintage Suede, and it’s one to which every single member of the current ensemble contributed something in the writing. Magnificently capturing the disturbing nature of unrequited love, Anderson’s string of similes is laced with sweet menace. “Like a sniper in the wings,” the lovelorn protagonist wails, “I will always be near.” Cue restraining order. Bloodsports’ final song then shifts its focus back to reciprocal love, albeit in a world gone to the dogs. Whereas the two proceeding tracks dwell on distrustful relationships and unwanted attachment, “Faultlines” is a much more idealistic piece about two lovers whose mutual affection brings light into a world of “wreckage” where car alarms drown out birdsong. It’s hauntingly apposite in 2013.
“A return to form” seems to be the music world’s collective reception to Bloodsports, but – save for their mostly-flat Singles-era offerings – I don’t think that that Suede ever went off the boil; they just got lost in TV and aberrant positivity. This record, though, sees the band lost to the bloody ravages of love once more, their songs capturing all the anger, alienation and untied amour of a world happy to push light BDSM in its chick lit. Wipe away those Tears; Suede are back and better than ever.
