WHERE WERE YOU WHEN THEY TOOK CALAIS?
Just some quick working updates.
Last week was pretty hellacious. The new manga took way too long. Not since Duklyon have I had anything comparable, and this was about 25% longer. Monday night I just buckled down and attacked it until it was done. Plus, Bendis dropped the latest Powers trade in my lap, already behind in scheduling, and that sucked up a ton of extra hours. Ironically, he and Alisa invited the Oni folk out for dinner on Wednesday, and my not being able to go reinspired his ire that I am an antisocial git, probably putting me back on his list of people he won’t invite places, completely ignoring that the reason I had to stay home was that he fucked my schedule (hence, the irony). In addition, I was working to get Last Exit Before Toll, Scooter Girl #4, and The Complete Soulwind off to Quebecor, so it wasn’t like my day job wasn’t kicking my ass, too. (Soulwind is still dangling.)
Wrote a quick review for the Oni mailer detailing and continuing my recent Suede love. I was going to link it separately so those on that list wouldn’t have to have their eyes offended by it again, but my cocksucking Front Page program doesn’t want to work and since slapping the shit out of my keyboard doesn’t seem to fix it, fuck you, you can suffer. (Besides, in this one I fix a couple of typos that the person who sent out the e-mail, who I asked to proofread before he sent, because I had only written this in five minutes, didn't catch. Grrrrr...)
Suede
SINGLES
(Sony Music UK)
It was on my second listen of the new Suede SINGLES compilation that I felt my life shift. Since I was probably 15, if you had asked me who my favorite band was, who was the best of all-time, I’d say The Smiths without thinking. Suede and The Who would easily follow behind (though, granted, Suede arrived when I was a bit older).
But listening to the 21 tracks on this disc, something switched my head on, and I found myself thinking, “This. This is a good as it’s ever been.”
If I stop to analyze it, my only guess is that Brett Anderson and company can play all sides. They can be as sad and romantic as they come (evidenced here by the aching “The Wild Ones” and the dreamy “Saturday Night”), hopeful and touching (“Everything Will Flow”), nasty and mean (“We Are The Pigs”), and plain rocking (“Beautiful Ones,” “So Young”). For all their charms—the wit of Morrissey, the hooks of Johnny Marr—The Smiths very much had their thing, and they worked that furrow until it was complete (and some would say Morrissey is still working with it). Their career went in a straight line, easily drawn from THE SMITHS to STRANGEWAYS, HERE WE COME. Suede haven’t done that. They’ve gone from glam to goth to super glam to electronic to acoustic, all in the space of five albums.
And this one has it all. We have first single, “The Drowners,” still effective in its bizarre adolescent sex fetishism, all the way to new tracks “Attitude” and “Love the Way You Love,” both bizarrely patterned and completely unexpected, the sound of a band with loads of confidence who aren’t afraid to just do what they want. And impressively, only twice on this album are tracks from the same record put back to back. They’ve shuffled them all up, and it works. You don’t feel like you’re jumping around, that there is no plot. It’s all being buzzed out of the same amp.
Granted, right now I am full of the euphoria of a new release, and my mind could slide back to give Morrissey & Marr their crown—but as of right now, the queen of my world is Suede. – Jamie S. Rich
Current Soundtrack: The Beautiful South, Welcome to… 
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