12 Overlooked Pieces of Awesome is an article series where each month Flint hopelessly rambles about an album in his collection that he dearly loves, even when they have their flaws. Each of the albums chosen tends to be usually overlooked, or forgotten, in one way or another and thus this article series aims to give an alternative view on said albums, or simply just bring something a bit less known to the spotlight.

Suede – Head Music (1999)

I don’t listen to Suede anymore. Much, anyway. I used to – all of the studio albums and the Singles compilation being in my CD collection can attribute to that. They had some nice swagger, Brett Anderson had charisma, Singles is a pretty damn good collection that stands well in itself and most importantly they had songs. Overtime though, I’ve cooled down significantly to them. It’s not you, it’s me and so forth – I just can’t really get into the same mindset I was in back when I was big into them. I only ever listen to two albums because all the others just seem to have lost their magic to me – Suede is cool but requires a certain mindset to me; A New Morning is the best example there is about the dangers of overproduction and that sometimes staying a lot in studio and finecrafting every detail can result to problems, as whatever good the album’s got is wrapped in soulless plastic shine and the weaker material have been tried to turn into good stuff by endlessly polishing them so there’s nothing left; and everyone else’s favourite Dog Man Star always felt like the group’s weakest album to me because after the good start (”We Are the Pigs” is easily one of the band’s very best tunes) it derails into a horrible carcrash of overly indulgent boredom and terribly melodramatic cheese. Even Coming Up, one of my de-facto summer albums and one of Britpop’s best achievements, is a bit bogged down in my opinion because of its ballad-heavy second half these days.

The one album I still enjoy and listen to more often than not is Head Music, the band’s much-disliked 1999 electro-glam effort which is what this update is about. This just ends up proving a couple of things again: that for some reason I’m into all the albums that everyone else dislikes and that for some reason I always get into the moments when a rock band decides to add a bit more keys and synths to the mix.

In its core Head Music doesn’t differ much from what Suede’s known for: grandeuse rock songs and big ballads covered in style and swagger, with Brett Anderson wailing on about lust and love using his tiny dictionary of weird Andersonian clichés and generally going on weird little tangents (like the foot fetishism in “Savoir Faire”). The big difference is that now it’s all coated in synthesisers and electronic flavours: drums produced to sound like electronic ones and synth drums working alongside normal ones, synth buzz and keyboard walls covering the background, even guitars are treated with filters of all sorts to make them sound more futuristic. Head Music is like a scifi version of Suede, all futuristic gleen and sheen. While Suede’s always been a lot about style and young vitriol, with Head Music they stopped trying to be stylish in the present and opted to fly straight into some imaginary future where pent up sexual frustration frolics together with chrome-covered robots and tricky electronics. While the band was actively searching for the direction themselves, they’ve also credited the producer Steve Osborne to be a huge part of what finally came out. And all credit to Osborne, he’s made an album where sheen and electronics work greatly.

Head Music is one of those albums where you might not necessarily find anything deep or mindshatteringly unique touch even if you’re keen on the album – I certainly can’t say that it’s got a grand personal touch on me outside the nostalgic factors. It doesn’t need them either. Head Music is an excellent album for the simple reason that it works. The grand rock soundscapes grab you and take you high, lift up the mood and before you know it, you’re feeling good and singing along louder than you realise. The ballads are well crafted and sound sincere rather than overly dramatic like Suede tends to do. There’s just enough restraint in the music to tie it up tighter and stop it from going into the territories of overblown without sounding emotionally suffocated – the whole thing sounds a bit sexually frustrated which ties perfectly to the song themes. The electronic touches back the songs wonderfully and together with the clean production it gives the album a brilliantly slick feel that suits the suave feel of the tunes somewhere between glam rock and futuristic electronic – which it still does despite it being a decade old, perhaps because the sound doesn’t even try to sound fashionable (for the time) but simply stylish. Perhaps most importantly it’s also consistent: there are no truly flawed patches on the album unlike every other Suede album. The one that comes closest is the mildly controversial “Elephant Man”, written solely by the keyboardist Neil Codling and the only track not produced by Osborne because he detested the song so much. If you can accept the fact that it’s a big, clunky and brainddead rock strut and just get into the feel of it, it’s not much of a problem most of the time despite always feeling a bit out of place on the album.

Electricity

Some of the band’s finest songs are found on Head Music. The four more-or-less hit singles lifted from the album are all class: “Electricity” and “Can’t Get Enough” showcase the album’s rock side, the latter reaching for anthemic heights and kicking off the album with speed while the latter focuses more on a kicking drive and thrust. On the other side of the spectrum, “She’s in Fashion” is an infectiously addicting and sugarsweet pop diamond with lush string samples while “Everything Will Flow” is the band’s best ballad. Both “Savoir Faire”, “Hi-fi” and “Asbestos” are all mid-tempo and heavily synthed up, possibly the ultimate scifistic visions on the album. The title track not only offers us a terribly double-entendre pun with its “give me head, give me head, give me head music instead” refrain but also a burst of energy after several calmer tracks. The two stylistic standouts are “Indian Strings” and “Crack in the Union Jack” – the former is an almost cinematic ballad in the sense that its string score sounds more like a movie score rather than your usual string fluff (and its vaguely Eastern style lends the song its name) with no trace of the electronic influence of the rest of the album, while the closing Crack in the Union Jack is a huge difference to the polished sound of the rest of the album, finishing the album with a quick acoustic lament with a distant, lo-fi sound.

It’s never been fully clear to me why exactly Head Music is disliked a lot. I assume it’s a lot to do with the fact that it’s not Dog Man Star (thank fuck for that) and generally that it’s an album released after Bernard Butler and his rather ordinary guitaring left the band, where Brett Anderson had grown up and stopped being a glammed up twit trying to act all gay for the kicks et cetera. In other words, it’s from their less fashionable period. Treat this passage rhetorically, I already know I’m in the minority here so no need for an armada of comments about me bashing Dog Man Star. Anyway, on the other hand, I consider it to be the peak of a band that always suffered from unevenness and who faded away rather miserably after this album. Head Music breaks the mold by doing something a bit more different rather than sticking to any sort of previous formula by the band and thus manages to stand out. Plus it’s got a plethora of the band’s best songs, it’s consistent rather than mix and match in quality, and still sounds interesting and highly enjoyable. Futuristic lust has never sounded so good.

MP3: Asbestos
MP3: Everything Will Flow

Buy the album from Amazon

She’s in Fashion

Tags: 12 Overlooked Pieces of Awesome, suede

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 22nd, 2009 at 6:01 pm and is filed under Retrospective. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.