An early contender for album of the year.

Some three years after Suede’s untimely demise, and two from the slightly boring debut by The Tears, Brett Anderson breaks out with his first solo album.

And it’s the best thing he’s done in years. Not to denigrate unfairly his previous work, but Suede’s final album was, in retrospect, the unconvincing “A New Morning”, and “Here Come The Tears” was the sound of two men trying, and failing, to capture decade old past glories : both looked to the past whilst trying to be of the future.

“Brett Anderson” creates a new, and wonderful niche. The trademarks of the past, the hoi polloi lyrics about gasoline and concrete skies and atomic winters, the semi glam rock stomps, are all firmly consigned to the dustbin of history. Instead, this debut carves a new, mature, unafraid vision.

Taking it’s cue from the torch song LP’s of the late Sixties (right down to the portrait of the artist in his living room), this debut is the sound of someone stepping out of their own, self-made prison of parody, and reinventing themselves. In these songs, Brett is the windswept, longcoated semi-tragic antihero of widescreen failed romances. Lead off single, the fabulous “Love Is Dead” is an anthem to the very malaise of modern life, held up – as all the album is – by vast and tender string arrangements. The fragile melody stubbornly walks on, as if somehow battling a snowstorm of hope crushed under the boots of a generally uncaring world. Piano notes exist in a brittle moment where it seems that love could be real, and yet it is also dead. The contradiction of hope.

“One Lazy Morning” sounds just like the title : built on a rolling, hypnotic motif, it ebbs and flows under lyrics about nothing and something. “Dust And Rain” is the nearest thing to his previous work, resembling a brutal, hard edged, abrasive interpretation of something from the final Suede album – as does, to a latter extent “Intimacy” which is almost a plea for the same.

What is refreshing is how Brett has abandoned his lyrical shorthand of the past that made him so easy to parody. Instead of reverting to type, he has tried something new. The words – with the exception of the third person lecture of “The More We Own The Less We Have Of Ourselves” – are raw, personal, and above all, reflect a verisimilitude of honesty that has been concealed in the past through creative pigeonholing. “To the Winter”, like much of the rest of the album, is built of torch songs the like of which even Leonard Cohen has never seen. The language of these songs, even the non-lingual vocal stylings, communicate more than some bands entire careers. As if sometimes, mere language were not enough. And if language were enough, we wouldn’t need music in our lives. 

“Brett Anderson”, despite it’s prosaic title, is about the driving force that makes men men and women women. The lure and the impossible shapes of love, about the way desire turns people inside out, and about the windswept, rainpelted hope of human beings. An early contender for album of the year.

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