But where does she go and what does she do?

Continuing my trip back through the 1994 album charts.

16/10/94 : Dog Man Star - Suede


This is our third album visit with Suede (along with two gig visits) and this is probably the album that really kicked off my interest in the band - it's one I owned (taking us to three for the year) and listened to loads, although I've not revisited it in ages.

Yeah - I still like this and remembered most of the songs. Lots of albums aim to have a good short opening track and they put pressure on themselves here by calling it "Introducing The Band" - but they pull it off and then segue nicely into "We Are The Pigs" which has a proper swagger to it. And the rest of if is also good with a decent variety across the album with the faster ones like "New Generation" allowing the band to rock out and the slower ones like "Daddy's Speeding" allowing Brett to show off his voice (it's really very decent on this album). But the pinnacle for me combines the two, with the 9:25 of "The Asphalt World" somehow not being quite long enough for me - it's possible my favourite Suede track and comes along just as you think "this album is pretty good" and it just blows you away. So yeah, I like this album.

We're at #3 in the charts this week with a new entry at the start of a decent twenty week run. The rest of the top five were Bon Jovi, R.E.M., The Cranberries and Cliff Richard with the next highest new entry being Reel 2 Real (#8).

Wikipedia has a lot more than I was expecting on the album (317 milliPeppers) and it tells us this is their second album and the last one featuring Bernard Butler. It was seen as a deliberate move away from BritPop (which Brett described as "a musical Carry On film" which isn't that far off the mark). There's actually quite a lot of interesting stuff on there, but the thing that jumped out at me was the original version of "The Asphalt World" was 25 minutes long with an 8 minute guitar solo - I think that might have proved a bit too much for me. 

The critical reviews at the time were mixed, but most UK reviews were positive and most US reviews considered it overblown and pompous. Retrospective reviews are all very positive (with an interesting quote from Dougie Payne from Travis that "as far as I'm concerned, the Britpop wars were won by Suede and Pulp") - which is rarer for albums which weren't huge commercial successes, with #5 in Sweden and #14 in Finland being the best it did elsewhere.

discogs.com tells us that you can pick up a decent version for a couple of quid but there's a version available for £280 - with no obvious reason for it being that expensive. I won't be spending £280 on it, but I could be tempted by a vinyl version - I like this album a lot and was glad I got a reminder to revisit it.

23/10/94 - Too noodly for me

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