The production on the early Suede albums

Realizing I am about to revolt all of you but utterly not caring about it, Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness has more conceptual integrity than Dog Man Star and that fucker is twice as long.

Despite all my rage you're still just a rat in a cage.

Ned, i hadn't noticed you liked suede that much, we could have talked about that in bruxelles ! (for instance how heretic it is to prefer "coming up" to the two first ones...).

Allowing for my lack of guitar-playing prowess, how can one tell? I remember reading interviews when Dog Man Star was released in which it was revealed that Brett played the guitars, but the electric lead sounds an awful lot like Bernard.

Are there other songs in the Suede catalogue on which Brett plays?

as for other songs played by brett, i suppose there must be in the post-butler albums as there are songs he wrote alone...

That's Suede. Dreadful band, acceptable and half-convincing at the time (like KasabianLibertineArcticKaiserKillers currently seem 'good' to some young and not-so-young folk) truly embarrasing now, they remind me of Placebo but withe the good stuff spread even thinner.

well, i guess, that's roughly what bernard thought at the time !
as for the rest of your post, i don't agree, of course, but it's all about taste, eh...

(has 30 second compact flashback of 1992-94. stares at comment. mouth moves. no words become available..)

I must have been unusually overwhelmed by indie-student-glam that day to have had bile to spare on this. Heck, they're mostly mediocre (Britpop was a hero to most...) roughly equivalent to the class of '06 I guess. Depressing how little things change :/

They were certainly nowhere near as irritating as Placebo in the making a career out of three ideas stakes.

FWIW Brett mentioned the other day that while the Tears continue on his solo album is finally coming out soon. I admit I don't know what to think of that.

Here's where I admit I have yet to hear the album in full. (Did it even get a US release?) The couple of mp3s I heard were nice enough.

If he's not up to much, he could ask the Psychedelic Furs for his old job back.

well if by getting back with the guy with whom he's done the best work of his life all he could come up with was some ok-but-a-bit-boring songs, I don't have high expectations...
and OTM about the handling of 2 comebacks back to back !

a nice read : http://thequietus.com/articles/16540-suede-dog-man-star-reissue-anniversary-review

and as for production on DMS :

'New Generation' on the other hand was, to Buller, a disaster. The stampeding cavalry of those Martin Chambers/Clem Burke drums, a multi-tiered pop attack all made 'New Generation' sound like a sure thing. But It was ruined by an abysmal mix, the "worst of my career," confesses the producer. Later on 'Trash' was viewed as the corrective to this wasted opportunity. "The guitars on that track were amazing and they were lost in the song," he admits. "The tapes should have been handed over to someone else, I was shot."

The mixing of the album was hastily completed. Buller claims that what exists on the original masters is far superior to what actually emerged. What did emerge sounded subterranean, drenched in that Butler-baiting reverb. Over the years, such flaws become part of a record's peculiar charm, even becoming the sonic glue that binds it together.

it's funny how time changes people : now the track I enjoy the most on DMS is "Black or Blue"... and I would consider the Tears album a pretty good follow up to DMS in parallel universe !

it's a freaking amazing piece that. interesting how BB has been proved right about the album and now even the producer is saying so.

how I wish a Butler DMS mix existed somewhere...

And as the years went by Butler made digs that barely concealed the trauma he felt from never taking Dog Man Star to completion.

I'd never thought about this but it must definitely be awful to have been unable to finish his masterpiece... (actually prevented from !)
kinda like Brian Wilson and Smile.
Maybe Butler should release Bernard Butler's DMS !

Never really got BB's complaints about DMS production. The production jobs for McAlmont & Butler and The Tears sound pretty similar - with extra lashings of gloopy string to make them sound even messier.

like.. woah.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qFpeo1YLLsU

Butler's production on The Tears' album is worse than any Suede album

The production jobs for McAlmont & Butler and The Tears sound pretty similar

I disagree on this. Not to say he's a great producer or anything (he's not) but his production is very different from Buller's. Less reverb, clearer and more organic sound.
For instance on "Apollo13" from the Tears, Brett's voice is so close and naked it's almost disturbing !

Fair enough, I just listened to Apollo 13 and you're right about the vocals. I don't know if I'd call it an organic sound, but you have a point. There's a kind of claustrophobic layering I don't like on a lot of Bernard Butler stuff, but even on something like Yes with McAlmont the vocals are actually quite clear on top of the muddy mess.

I also listened to the recent Suede album again today, and some of the songs are great, but the reverb is pushed way past Dog Man Star levels even. It's terrible on headphones.

I never got into the latest album and don't understand the raving reviews. "it starts and end with you" is ok but nothing else really grabbed me.
actually, apart from the Butler era, there's nothing I feel like listening to from them (even though I liked "Coming Up" and even some stuff from "Head music" at the time...).
They still made some good songs after BB but I think the music lost a lot of depth. it became more superficial, like unidimensional (not just the poppy singles, even nice songs like "to the sea").

I rate Bloodsports up there with the first three Suede albums, but my god is the mastering horrible.

I've grown to appreciate the production as this particularly British shitty sound aesthetic, sort of like American lo-fi, but higher-fi, yet still so weird and thin and shitty. Like they just don't know how to record the bottom end or distorted guitars right, or are trying to use hi-fi equipment to recall the less hi-fi "Ziggy Stardust" sound.

yeah i'm baffled by the raves too it's a terrible record IMO, no better than Head Music. post-Butler they had maybe 2 great songs (Picnic.. and Chemistry.. off Coming Up) and beyond that they could be any half-decent Uk guitar band.

somehow, I think the first taste of the post BB line up is "the power". even at the time of the release, when I didn't know that butler didn't play on it, I found it a bit dull and liveless although it's nice and poppy (it's the only song that I never feel like listening to on DMS). so the problem of post butler suede is not just about the songwriting, since it was a butler/anderson song. there's a raw and passionate aspect in the performance that got lost with butler's departure.
when you listen to the guitar parts on "the power", it's almost a joke. some (very un-butler) acoustic strumming and very basic electric licks. there's almost nothing. they filled up the song with strings but it still sounds very empty.

the end of "the power" is scary, what is that huge whining sound that envelopes everything?

well, I don't think it's possible to imagine what they would have done after DMS had they stayed together. and "coming up" and the mcalmont & butler stuff are certainly no indications since they would have evolved differently if they had kept working together, I suppose.
the BBC documentary is interesting when BB says 1/ he's never been as creative as during DMS ever since 2/ he's been traumatized for years and until now by having been left behind and not being able to finish his "baby".
I guess something was broken in him (and BA) at that key moment.