Night Thoughts is Suede’s first out-and-out concept piece. How many albums have a forty-eight-minute movie that sees the whole record played from start to finish as a promo video? None that I’m aware of. How many records see one song segue into the next, with themes and refrains returning as its lyrical narrative unfolds? Not many. Though still populated with memorable numbers capable of standing alone, such as singles “Outsiders” and “Like Kids”, Night Thoughts is primarily a post-punk homage to grand movie scores, developing ideas and refrains gradually over twelve tracks rather than just the customary one. As a result, it’s the most cohesive Suede album of the lot – a more tightly-focused Dog Man Star, with all the lush splendour thereto, but an even more harrowing underbelly that at times borders on the odious.At times, the twelve-track LP evokes the latter half of the preceding Bloodsports as well as the aforementioned Dog Man Star, but its sound is very much its own, combining Suede’s distinctive indie sound with a full string section to create an abstract art-rock opera. Brooding from the start, the album is – almost – bookended by two linked tracks, “When You Are Young” and “When You Were Young”, both of which revel in the sort of symphonic grandeur that made “She’s in Fashion” such an indelible part of the fabric of the summer of ’99. Here, though, Brett Anderson’s falsetto is not admiring but haunting as, impenetrably, he sings of brothers’ guns and twisting on fists.
Lead single “Outsiders” is much more redolent of Suede’s highly regarded seven-inchers. A poor man’s “Obsessions” or a dark take on “Trash”, it’s the one track on the record where the Haywards Heath outfit play it safe. Catchy and radio-friendly, the track’s asocial angst bleeds into the altogether more interesting “No Tomorrow”, which also has all the hallmarks of a great single, but in addition boasts a level of depth that the previous track lacks. Question after question is framed (“How long will it take to break the plans that I never make?” / “How long will I shun the race and sit around in my denim shirts?” / “How long will it take to mend?”) as Anderson begs the listener - or, perhaps, the suicidal middle-aged man in the film - to “fight the sorrow like there’s no tomorrow.”
“Will you have courage of your tenderness?
When the wolf is at your door, the child against your breast…”
First-listen highlight “Pale Snow” is up next. Its relative brevity belies its significance as the melodic and thematic cornerstone of the album, and indeed its story. Mournful, morbid, and with heavy overtones of the worst kind of bereavement, its lyrics are amongst Night Thoughts’ most portentous as the singer’s questions collapse into grim acceptance. “And they always get away. It never works out for me...” A longer, similarly rich but slightly more animated number follows in “I Don’t Know How to Reach You”. Its mellifluous melody is sodden with despair; “I’d steal a shadow for you, I’d love you like a knife…” he wails. It’s not just another post-lovesong in which a “dappled and still unshaved” protagonist laments his lost love – it’s laden with shock, lending it a sense of immediacy and veracity that sets it apart from the many romantic post-mortems that came before it.“There’s no room in the world for your kind of beauty.
Yours are the names on tomorrow’s newspapers.
Yours is the face of the desperate edge of now, when,
like the snows of yesteryear, I’ll be gone from this Earth…”
Despite its prosaic title and upbeat tune, “What I’m Trying to Tell You” continues the moribund protagonist’s slow submission to death. Of all the album’s tracks, it most calls to mind early Suede – songs like “Stay Together” in which Anderson would momentarily stop singing and switch into eerie voiceover mode. However far they’ve come, it’s pleasing to see the Britpop survivors injecting aspects of their old style into new material – particularly when it’s so perfect a fit. The horrifically sad “Tightrope” continues the old-school feel, calling to mind some of Dog Man Star’s most melancholy offerings (“You seem to love me when I am not around, but I have to go to ground…”), yet with the sort of torpid pace usually reserved for a CD2 B-side. Again, it’s an ideal match for Night Thoughts’ theatrical death march - measured and poignant.
“Oh through the red lights, the amber, the silent mannequins, the crumpled mothers in their seats pull into morning through the stations, the smell of chemicals. Do I want you because you are out of reach?”
The next couple of tracks offer a brief respite from the drowning; a last lungful of air. “Learning to Be” provides a gentle moment of romantic reflection for the album’s nameless drownee, “Like Kids” a flashback rumination on bygone days and roads not taken. Is it hope or resignation in Anderson’s voice as he sings, “I try to step away, but I’m too scared to move, like I’m in love again”? I wonder.
“So I turn my attention to the bruise that’s on her fist, feel the pulse beneath her almost perfect wrist… And her keys are falling from her coat as I weave my fingers round her perfumed throat…”
Then we get to the really fucked-up shit. Upping the ante on Bloodsports’ stalker anthem, “Always”, “I Can’t Give Her What She Wants” is an ode to suicide, or perhaps even attempted murder, tenderly sung like a serenade. Gentle, thoughtful and laced with violent death, it’s instantly one of the band’s greatest ever efforts – a daring, edgy masterpiece that calls to mind triumphs the like of smackhead split-up song, “The Living Dead”. Thankfully, age has given Suede the confidence not to relegate such controversial tunes to B-sides on interim singles.
“And who knows what we’ll become as we brave the weather. From the moment we are young, the fur and the feathers, the fox and the geese, the thrill of the chase…”
Growing out of the “When You Were Young” reprise, Night Thoughts’ story ends in “The Fur and the Feathers”, in which our drowning man ponders “meaning beyond the flesh” as he reflects on more worldly pleasures. It’s a predictable and slightly sub-par end to what is for the most part a bold and dazzling body of work, but it may prove to be a grower yet.
“Have Suede re-invented the album?” asks the Telegraph. Well, no - they haven’t. But they have released another bloody good one; one that’s markedly different from any of their previous efforts, and indeed most albums in general, but one that’s nonetheless a far cry from truly groundbreaking works such as The Wall and Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. It’s too loose a tale to warrant comparison with the former, at least without the film’s telling images; it’s too tight a sound to compete with the latter. Yet I love its nihilistic brutality, its meandering amoral musings, the darkness thinly veiled by its attractive aural splendour. Come and play in the maze…
The Night Thoughts album is available to download from iTunes for £8.99, while the full-length promo movie is available to download from iTunes too in 1080p for £10.99. Amazon offer the album on CD for £9.99 plus delivery, and upon ordering you can immediately download the MP3 album at no extra charge. The MP3 album alone is the same price as iTunes’.
