The production on the early Suede albums

It wasn't on an album and had two fantastic b-sides.

xpost

and it was january

no, i mean, when they were recording "head music", brett had something in mind (a prince like sound)and when the album was done and beck's one was released, he was very pissed because that was the sound he wanted for "head music" !

well, of course but it's just that as much as i like the song, there's something that keeps it from being really great... brett's lyrics/vocals seem a bit throwaway i think (and brett's later feelings toward this song may confirm that).
this is the one time when i'd agree with bernard's "i made this great music and that bastard puts awful lyrics to it" position.

I thought the production on Suede was very straightforward, but I agree with Theorry that Dog Man Star had "weird" moments. DMS appeared to be more of "Bernard, the madman in the recording studio" than anything else. Christ, isn't Asphalt World long enough?

Stay Together may be Suede's best single + b-sides combo with My Dark Star and The Living Dead. If We Are the Pigs didn't have the chorus of children at the end, I may have cast my vote there - Killing of A Flashboy and Whipsnade may have been Bernard and Brett's best moments together.

What do you think of Jubliee, one of the Head Music b-sides? I think it may have been Codling's best work.

I own all Suede singles minus only two later ones, still collected them even after they fell out of flavor with me.

Suede – Eno’s Introducing The Band (15:45)
http://s17.yousendit.com/d.aspx?id=2YUQFXO3ONWRX1SHBU9N6F9QFZ
Suede – Stay Together (8:30)
http://s21.yousendit.com/d.aspx?id=31K59AGGAPLW22KOGYVC8GYVZG

I'll agree with you -- though I loved them from pretty much the first single, it wasn't until Coming Up that everything just came together perfectly. It is still hands down my favorite album by them.

Yep, "Stay Together" was released Feb 1994, "DMS" in Sept 1994.

Btw. The more I listen to the last two albums, the more I realise breaking up was probably a good thing to do.

i have no idea what suede mean to ned, though -- for me they're so bound up with *what england was like* in the early '90s, i don't see how they might travel. in that sense though, 'coming up' *was* right for mid-1996. but all of the self-consciously 'weird' people in my school liked it, which was kind of cramping, and i think el brettster played up to this too much ('trash', 'beautiful ones', etc).

Scrap that. Flashboy for the club, please.

But Pulp's His n Hers was another Ed Buller production! it sounds very similar to suede and dms, I think. And I love all three. He's especially good at wobbly drifty underwater piano sounds, which remind me of the clunky old upright we used to have at our school.

i have no idea what suede mean to ned, though

A band I really loved from 1992 on and started a mailing list for in 1995 and etc. Among other things.

Anglophilia is everywhere (and only feels stronger in year 6 of the Bush Regime).

Sci-Fi is great, too. I think pointing to Suede's "cast-offs" as proof that they were the world-beaters during that period is OTM. Should I go look for a Tears thread, or will people chime in here?

This is true. However there's a conceptual integrity to the thing – a gestalt, let's call it – which holds it together despite that middle stretch.

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.

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?

While I'll agree that 'The Power' sounds out of place on Dog Man Star, not only because Butler isn't playing on it, but also since there's a noticeable difference in production from the rest of the album which makes it come out sounding lighter, I completely disagree that Suede stopped being good when Butler left. What fucked Suede up was Brett's drug intake, not Butler leaving.

who played the parts on "The Power" -- was it Anderson uncredited or Oakes?

It definitely wasn't Oakes. I think he only became a member of Suede about month or so before Dog Man Star was released, and it would have been finished and "in the can" by then. I think the first recording Oakes played on was 'This World Needs A Father', B-side to The Wild Ones, which has both Oakes and Butler on guitar... and then of course, his first songwriting contribution was 'Together', B-side to New Generation.

From this piece:

"There was one song he didn't play on at all, The Power," Paphides explains. "They got this session guitarist in who was one of the very best you could get. He played what was on Bernard's demo, note for note. But it didn't sound right."

The demo of The Power was called Banana Youth. The session guy obviously followed some of the guitar parts note for note, but BY doesn't sound anything like a finished song. Brett's just trying stuff out, high in the mix and full of reverb, on top of a very very rough guitar track. If Bernard had still been about, this would have ended up very different.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IBXqIbGLe0Q

I like The Power btw. At the time, it seemed like one of the weaker tracks, but now it's cool. I remember them talking it up in an interview at the time (in Select I think), saying how its lighter sound reflected their relief from the tension of BB being around.

The Power = Shed 7 on an off day.

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

― Welcome To (Turrican)

Completely agree with this.

The Power is a really good song but compared to some of the B-sides they had around then it seems like a strange choice to have on the album. I'm not sure what would have been the best replacement. Killing of a Flashboy is my favourite but not sure that would work in its place.

Whipsnade would've worked instead of The Power. Similar lyrical themes and kind of light touch compared to surrounding songs. But I like The Power. Would rather have got rid of Black or Blue.

The Power = Shed 7 on an off day.

This is really crazy talk though. Just about the only Suede song I can think of that is Shed 7 level is One Love:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zbxopjx02DE

I finally got to listen to the BBC program "follow up albums" for DMS.
It's very interesting and quite heartbreaking the part with BB and BA admitting they were stupid and are still wounded and full of regrets to this day.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01j6srs

Also BA saying he should have changed the name of the band when BB left... so that they could have reunited later.

Meh, I think Suede did very well without Bernard. People are attracted to the Butler-era though, because that line-up didn't stick around long enough to make some out and out crap, which they probably would have done at some point had they continued. Post-Butler Suede made Coming Up and Bloodsports, so both line-ups have made two very good records, IMO. Not to mention B-sides such as 'Together', 'Europe Is Our Playground' amongst others.

Suede did lots of great stuff after Butler left, it's true, but it was within a quite specific 90s/00s alt-rock/indie template. They turned into a superior version of Placebo/Mansun, I reckon, which was fine but frustrating, because Dog Man Star suggested they were heading towards something more. Dog Man Star isn't indie at all - it's kind of pure classic/experimental rock, Bowie/Neil Young/Pink Floyd, not that original really - but even if they'd never have transcended the obvious influences I would've liked to have heard their equivalents of Station to Station or Low. On the other hand, there's nothing that Bernard's done since - in his solo stuff, with McAlmont, The Tears, or producing Libertines/Duffy etc - that comes anywhere close to the wildness of Dog Man Star. Maybe that record finished this part of him off? But there's this rock'n'roll fantasy of band members who hate each other making madder and madder music, and that's the thing that inspires regret.

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.