The Blue Hour

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Despite all that strangeness, the album is quintessentially Suede, and in fact, it sounds like something the band had aspired to for years yet unable to reach until now. Every song will send chills up your spines, either musically or lyrically. Unas cuerdas son el preludio a la voz de Anderson, que junto con unos arpegios y teclados, nos llevan hasta un puente donde unos violines que golpean las cuerdas con tremolo, aumentan la tensión que desemboca en un estribillo hermoso cantado en falsete. Dark, moody, and bloody fantastic. Richard Oakes has proved himself to be every bit as good as Butler ever was. And these last two albums also show that Brett was the beating soul of the band all along. They will (of course) be forever judged on Dog Man Star. That’s unfair, because DMS was very much of its time and times change. As a fan I’ve They will (of course) be forever judged on Dog Man Star. That’s unfair, because DMS was very much of its time and times change. As a fan I’ve changed too. I don’t want another DMS, and I guess Suede don’t want to make that record again either.

When I heard Life is Golden and then saw that it was sat in the middle of the record, I thought that it should have been the closing number like Next Life or Still Life. But it’s position at the centre is perfect. It’s an equal to Next Life and Still Life, yet at the same time is its own thing. For my money, it’s their best tune this side of Head Music. This is a new Suede, expanding on a sound that’s different to both the debut and DMS, and the post Bernard records. This is Blood Sports and Night Thoughts taking the next step. The Blue Hour is its own record but at the same time it works with the previous two releases in what feels like a whole. Which, on the strength of The Blue Hour – the third in a triptych that began, following their 2010 reunion, with Blood Sports in 2013 and continued with Night Thoughts in 2016 – won’t be any time soon. Suede 2.0 are not a heritage band by any stretch of the imagination. I think about it quite a bit. We’ve gone wrong in the past. We had an album called ‘A New Morning’ which was a disaster in every way. It was just a very bad record. We were trying to undermine the notion of what it is to be Suede fan and oppose all of those cliches. It’s a very interesting question for an artist: how much do they respond to what their audience wants and how much do they lead? You can parallel it with politicians, can’t you? There are those politicians who base their decisions around polling people and the public opinion and popular consensus. There are politicians who make very unpopular decisions, but they have a sense of vision about these things. There are parallels with the artist and their fanbase. It’s important to challenge what you fans want, because if you end up following that you end up in self parody. I’ve always wanted to avoid that. There is a fine line and it’s a very interesting fine line. You’re leading and introducing people to your ideas but you need to do it in your own language – but still for that language to be fresh.”He adds: “The Blue Hour is the time of day when the light is fading and night is closing in. The songs hint at a narrative but never quite reveal it and never quite explain,” says Anderson, explaining the title. But as with any Suede album, it’s always about the songwriting, the band, the passion and the noise.” And, thankfully, there’s plenty of that. SUEDE:: Banda anuncia novo álbum para setembro". Urge | Música, Filmes, Séries, Games (in Brazilian Portuguese). 30 April 2018 . Retrieved 5 May 2018. Bloodsports came along, and while it was decent, it kind of felt like an improvement, it also seemed like a middle-aged and mildly predictable progression from where they were before. Solid. Not bad. But there's so much else out there to listen to, so why bother? Truly, I thought I was through with Suede. Harley, Kevin (October 2018). "Suede – The Blue Hour". Record Collector. No.484. London . Retrieved 7 September 2019.

En la recta final del disco escuchamos “All The Wild Places”. Un corte que compusieron para el anterior álbum “Bloodsports”, pero que desestimaron por no acabar de encajar. En “The Blue Hour”, sin embargo, sí que se siente parte de esa belleza e inquietud. Es una canción en la que destaca la voz de Brett cantando una vez más a lo salvaje, arropada por la grandeza de una orquesta. “The Invisibles” Brett is candid about his son’s influence on him in creative terms: “It used to be friends or lovers but these days my muse is my son. I see life through his eyes. I imagined a fearful world, the way that a child sees it, and in a way, this was a reflection of my own childhood.” It’s an interesting thing. You have to choose your weapon, you have to choose your battleground. Unless you narrow it down to something specific, what are you going to write about? Everything? The world? History? I’ve always tried to talk about the microscopic, because that somehow illuminates the macroscopic. When you’re talking about relationships between people, that’s an incredibly political canvas. I’ve never been able to write about ‘the big picture’ in an obvious way. There are very few artists that can do that. That’s what politicians are for. An artist’s job is to reveal something more mysterious than that. It’s not the artist’s job to give any answers, it’s the artist’s job to deepen the mystery and to pose questions. You have to choose your canvas to work within. In talking about a small part of life, you can reveal further wider truths. But no, no Brexit anthems – is that going to be your headline?” Trendell, Andrew (19 September 2018). "Suede – 'The Blue Hour' review". NME . Retrieved 18 December 2019.Clayton-Lea, Tony (21 September 2018). "Suede: The Blue Hour review – Orchestral manoeuvres with a spark". The Irish Times . Retrieved 20 October 2018. Photography By [Inner Sleeve Photography] – Brett Anderson, Ian Grenfell, Neil Codling, Paul Khera, Simon Gilbert, Zelwanka The first promotional single, "The Invisibles", was released on 3 June 2018. Second single, "Don't Be Afraid If Nobody Loves You" followed on 12 July. The third, "Life Is Golden" was released on 15 August; its accompanying music video comprises footage of Ukrainian ghost town, Pripyat. Fourth single, "Flytipping" was issued on 14 September. The accompanying music video of "Wastelands" was uploaded on 29 October through their official YouTube channel, and featured the free-runner Robbie Griffith.

I think we’re at this stage of our career where it doesn’t really matter what we do, as long as we’re engaged in doing it and making it interesting. Because of that, we can do quite extreme things. This is a very complicated record, much more so than the last too – and more diverse. It’s quite a journey. There are a lot of elements that we haven’t used before, like a choir and more spoken word and dialogue. There are a lot of field recordings on it too to thread the ideas together.” Today I found a dead bird,” sings Brett Anderson on this album’s Scott Walker-esque centre-piece, ‘Roadkill’. Poor bloody bird, with its “ brittle bones like snapped twigs / Savaged by the tyres and tossed in the tar / Broken in the English dirt / A carcass for the carrying crow”. Set atop a haze of strings and drones, Anderson’s spoken-word lament and the surrounding atmosphere of fog, doom and death capture the essence of ‘The Blue Hour’.Copsey, Rob (30 April 2018). "Suede announce new album The Blue Hour". Official Charts Company . Retrieved 30 April 2018. There are immediate songs (Wastelands, Mistress, Life Is Golden, Tides, Flytipping...) and there are a bunch of miraculous growers (Chalk Circles, Beyond The Outskirts, All The Wild Places or the unfairly questioned The Invisibles, a monument when played live). Suede vuelven a la escena musical por la puerta grande con “The Blue Hour”, su octavo disco de estudio, un disco que, pese a sonar más oscuro e inquietante que sus predecesores, mantiene ese pop cuidado y melódico que tantos éxitos les reportó antaño. Y es que la mayoría de los catorce temas que lo componen cuentan con unos estribillos repletos de magia y belleza. To Anderson, they’re not so different. “I wanted The Blue Hour to be set in a very bleak, unpleasant landscape of roadkill, B roads and fly tipping,” he says. “As a city dweller, you can kind of romanticise the countryside as this kind of Arcadian idyll, but having lived there for a couple of years, I can tell you it just isn’t like that. There is a lot of ugliness and cruelty out there.”