Music
Suede
Royal Concert Hall, Glasgow
Jonathan Geddes
Three stars
THE thought of a Britpop era band performing their new album in full with an accompanying film doesn’t exactly set the pulse racing, but Suede have earned enough goodwill over the years that the prospect was intriguing. The record in question, Night Thoughts, is a fine album too, marrying their traditional pop cleverness with thoughtful reflection, so it was disappointing that the experiment didn’t quite come off.
This was due to a few factors, with the most glaring being that the music and the film, by Roger Sargent and being screened over the band, didn’t totally gel. It was an out-of-sequence tale of a man attempting suicide and his relationship with a woman, and proved so relentlessly cheerless that the protagonist wasn’t the only one pondering existence by the end.
Such gloom not only offset the muscular likes of No Tomorrow, but also overwhelmed them, too, diluting the impact of the actual song beneath the visuals. It took a couple of sparse tracks, centred around piano and Brett Anderson’s vocal, to strike a successful emotional note by crafting a more cohesive audio/visual experience.
If the set’s first half was an interesting idea, then the second portion flicked the switch from art project to hit-filled party. Anderson still has the cocksure swagger of a good frontman, and took a few trips into the crowd while apparently removing a button on his shirt with each song. The Concert Hall acoustics, meanwhile, proved equally suitable for bolshy guitar pop like Animal Nitrate, the punky distortion of Metal Mickey and a stripped-back sing-a-long of Everything Will Flow, meaning that for all the earlier experimentation the band stood most comfortably on familiar ground.
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