Brett And-there-isn’t-a-song

On Tuesday we listened to the new Brett Anderson album.

Now, I’ve been working in The Fly office for a while now, but this morning was the first time that an album received a round of applause when it finished.

“Wow!” you’re thinking, “you mean to say that the new Brett Anderson album, ‘Slow Attack’ is an excellent return to form?”

Alas no. We were not applauding the awe-inspiring musicianship, instead we broke out into the kind of spontaneous hooray-we’re-still-alive kind of applause usually reserved for airline passengers after an emergency landing.

Y’see, while ‘Suede’, ‘Dog Man Star’ and ‘Coming Up’ variously spewed spectacular androgy-pop, doomy, brooding outsider anthems, and even mainstream chart-crashers, the final Suede album was a perfect portent of the decade of disappointment to come; it had its moments, but you couldn’t help pining for the olden days. In the in-between time, even Brett himself seemed to think so, rekindling his scuffleicious partnership with Bernard Butler for an abortive reunion in The Tears.

Which brings us to his third solo album in three years, ‘Slow Attack’. It’s a largely piano-led, sparse, album, that retains Anderson’s flavour for murky, macabre darkness, and although it carves an impressive cinematic atmosphere, it’s far too aware of its own creepiness to ever bother with anything as trifling as a tune. In fact, at its very worst, it sounds like Bono wearing an overly-tight necktie having his feet nailed to a sinking raft.
The lyrics that were once laced with a seam of the depressingly familiar – that licked up and spat out the intricacies and insecurities of teenage sexuality with tremendous observational poise, are gone. I suppose the fact is, he’s grown up. And he’s become a bit of a bore.

This isn’t a personal grudge-based bit of muso-bashing, either. I attended college in Brett’s home town of Haywards Heath, right slap-bang in the uninspiring heart of Mid-Sussex. This was some years after he’d left (round about the time of ‘Coming Up’), and to our teenage minds, the rumour of his having grown up there manifested itself with a sort of ghostly omnipresence. To us, he was the eerily out-of-touch, cool elder brother who’d moved to London. Nowadays though, instead of maintaining the aura of an apparition, he just looks like one.

Anyway that was a cheap shot to end on so instead here’s a brief-but-interesting interview which touches on the root of what made Suede so great in the beginning, and neatly encapsulates the frustration of smalltown growing pains; something that definitely struck a chord with me when I was moody, 15, and generally a bit gutted about life.

“Oh maybe maybe it’s our nowhere towns, our nothing places and our cellophane sounds” – ‘Trash’ 1996