Maybe, maybe it's the clothes we wear

Continuing my trip back in time through the album charts

08/09/96 : Coming Up - Suede

When Suede first appeared with their debut album in 1992, they were massively praised by the music press which did make me slightly wary of them, but when I heard the album I had to admit I quite liked it.  But I really liked their follow up, Dog Man Star, so I was looking forward to this one coming out - but I wasn't so happy with it and can't say I've revisited it in many a long year.  So it will be interesting to see what I think of it with the benefit of a bit of a break.

And well - I'm still not sure where I am with this one.  It starts well with "Trash" and "Film Star" and, taken a track at a time, I'd struggle to say the quality really ever dips much lower throughout the album with "Beautiful Ones" and "The Chemistry Between Us" also standing out for me.  But as a whole album, I struggled to pay attention to it - but I'm not sure whether that's because the tracks are all a bit same-y or whether I should have been listening to it harder to pick up the many nuances that are undoubtedly present.  

My suspicion is that it would probably be a grower, but it's just not going to get the time, I'm afraid (and certainly not the 4.5 hours required to listen to the 20th anniversary edition).  It was a fun revisit though and it does mean I'm more likely to go back to Dog Man Star sometime soon and I might even revisit Sci-fi Lullabies and Head Music as well, so I appreciate it for that if nothing else.  I also appreciate the fact that this is another one I owned - 6/17 on the back of a four album run!

We're at #1 with a new entry this week (I told you they were big!) on a run of 41 weeks, which was swiftly followed by another run of nine weeks - this was actually their most successful album chart-wise.  The rest of the top five this week were Alanis, George, Pet Shop Boys (a new entry at #4 - which I've surprisingly never heard) and the damn Smurfs.  There were no more new entries in the top ten - the next one was Neneh Cherry's Man at #16, which I've never listened to either and really think I should.

Wikipedia has more on the album than I was expecting (145 milliPeppers) and tells me this was their first album after the departure of Bernard Butler, replaced by RIchard Oakes who was a mere 17 years old at the time.  It also notes the change of direction to "less complex, more immediate" songs (after the relative commercial failure of Dog Man Star) and the critics generally liked it.  The public were also keen, with it doing well here (spawning five top ten singles) and, for no obvious reason, in Scandinavia (#1 in Sweden and Denmark, #3 in Norway and #4 in Finland!).

"Customers also listened to" The Bluetones, Ash, Manic Street Preachers and Sleeper - a remarkably similar group to the last album.  I was surprised not to see some Elastica in there given my recently gained knowledge that Justine Frischmann was a founder member of Suede - learned from Brett Anderson's book Coal Black Mornings, which is an interesting read even if you have a slight suspicion that he has a somewhat inflated view of his importance to the world.  Having said that, this is a considerably less pompous album than Dog Man Star and I don't like it nearly as much, so I guess I don't really understand what I'm expecting from him and the band - but I did enjoy revisiting it though.

01/09/96 - An intriguing album
15/09/96 - Another fine revisit