Suuns – Felt
Genre: Rock Style: Indie Rock Year: 2018
Tracklist:
Look No Further 3:57 X-Alt 3:22 Watch You, Watch Me 5:57 Baseline 4:23 After The Fall 4:30 Control 3:30 Make It Real 4:40 Daydream 4:44 Peace And Love 3:45 Moonbeams 2:17 Materials 4:59
The Montreal four-piece Suuns write smoldering music that’s painstakingly assembled. They are philosopher-musicians, schooled in free jazz, no wave, IDM, and German motorik, and their records are studies in contrasts: Confrontationally limp, seductively bleak, synthetically punk. They are puritanical Dionysians, filling the air with gyrating, charcoal-dim fever dreams built by technocrats—perhaps they even smoked cigarettes before their peers and carried tattered copies of Camus from cafes to rehearsal spaces in the gothic Quebec twilight. This image is an absurd grab for context, sure, but the band’s fixations feel of a piece with it: Suuns (pronounced “soons”) are careful synthesists who, since 2007, have cultivated a sound that’s existential and sinister yet resonantly human.
If there’s a case to be made that subversion and dystopia can still fuel great left-of-center rock, Suuns make a damn convincing one. Felt, the band’s fourth full-length, is the first Suuns record to be unburdened by self-seriousness. Its predecessor, Hold/Still, gestured at the kaleidoscopic hall of mirrors they’d come to design, but the record was difficult to metabolize as a whole. Felt, however, sees Suuns loosen up and let slip the forces begging for release since their debut Zeroes QC. They showcase a swath of experimental guitar- and synth-based styles strewn through what’s become Suuns’ very particular lens: Soft-focus abrasion, wound tight and set free by the versatile producer John Congleton. This has been Suuns’ thesis since the beginning—cultivating “the sublime alchemy of idealism and conflict”—and they’ve finally struck a satisfying balance.
“X-Alt,” “Watch You, Watch Me,” and “Baseline,” a trifecta of future feeling at the front of Felt, encapsulates Suuns’ new mission best: Scorched techno-punk blurs to smiley-faced synth workout blurs to narcotic psych comedown. Nothing is what it seems, and no one musical element is in total command. Low-pitched synths flower and undulate and evaporate like storm clouds in spring. Drums rustle and tumble as single guitar notes drone in slinky repetition, smeared with cotton-light manipulation. Ben Shemie’s slack voice drifts beneath and above the fray, parched yet mellifluous. The effect works whether Suuns play slow or fast, as with shoegaze, and they are constantly searching for any place to inseam a groove.
On “Make It Real” and “Materials,” Suuns channel the German electronic composer Apparat, embracing a kind of blue-hued openness. They commune with the astral slackers Autolux, using only what’s necessary to generate a perennial bloom. Suuns’ synth hand and “default musical director” Max Henry says that Frank Ocean’s “use of space” was an inspiration, which is no strange thing, yet it grabbed me nonetheless: Until now Suuns seemed to wall themselves off as a matter of habit. Ocean’s no extrovert, but he’s an intersection for a wide array of listeners, and Felt exhibits a porousness that could also attract new and more varied fans of Suuns. Perhaps, in the end, we’ll all want it weird.