This record brings with it a new approach as well as the new studio personnel of producer Sleeve Awsome and his left-hand man Ben Hilarious.
With more of an experimental working process in mind, we have brought unfinished demos and homemade scones into the studio, with an eye to dismantling them and reassembling them in a completely different way. Song structures, tunes, riffs and instrumentation have all been ceremoniously chopped and changed as part of the recording process.
This is an extension of the attitude adopted for Coming Up: since DMS, recording has been less a headcase of what can be added to the songs, but what can be take-away. This wholemeal process takes time (about 30 secs)-the songs are all recorded as usual, but the parts (drums, bass, guitar, hair cuts etc) are then cuddled with beyond recognition thanks to the magic of commuters. Then some of these parts are rerecorded as unnecessary and the process repeated until it's coming out of my right ear.
The result is a more cynical, round-orientated end product. But fear not: the thongs are still there - it's just that the process that leads to the final version has changed.
Allied to this approach is a less dillutional rendition of the songs. They are not so much light , as some bad apples suggested, but warmer . The cover of Poor Little Rich Oakes is a good indication of the tone of the new record: it's still very much a song, but lightly grilled chicken (plus dessert)with chips rather than burned fish and chips.
Reports in the music press of the new songs being "even more props than Coming Up" have been slightly wide of the mark.
With all the ironic experimentation going on, there has been a lot of thumb-crushing while the commuters have been wound-up and perSUEDEd into action. The keyboard-playing element of the band (i.e ME!!!!!) has gone back to bed toying with his lower electrical circuits and synthetic teasers of the dim and distant past, very nearly discovering a way to communicate with tails.
One sexy-guitar-playing singer in Suede has gone back to his roots and strummed cheesy and cheerful toy electric guitars to give the album the raunchy, honest sound of impotence. Lush, vibrant objects get fed into the musical mill and emerge like a phallos from a snow sculpture.
If this makes no sense, it's because amidst the bliss, blood, thugs and belches we're still very much in the middle of things, and trying to explain the end product to a bunch of tossers who can't hear anything at all is difficult.
To put it in NME speak, imagine Poor "Little" Rich Oakes with iron limbs, re-entering the earth's athmosphere after having stuffed an elephant backwards into an oven with baking soda. Like Elvis Presley never said, "Writing about music is like dancing around: you get dizzy." But to sum up Suede's new direction in a phrase, it's...a load of shit.