new introductory bit here.

This is a reviews page based on my own collection, which just keeps growing despite itself. If it isn't listed here, it's because I don't own it yet, or I haven't gotten around to it yet.

Also, bother your local "new rock" radio station and make sure they are playing "new rock" and not "Rock the Casbah," which is not new.

note: entries in red text indicate my pick for the artist's best available album. A gold numeral indicates the POPocalypse winner of the year's best album; second- and third-place winners are in blue. Green lettering indicates an obviously exploitative record company compilation without apparent artist input.

Guitars during the British shoegazing period of the early 90s served as dense sonic landscape-builders. There was little place for cleanly-picked attacks and solos in those days. Suede's Bernard Butler was among the first of the 90s British guitar heroes who found inspiration in Johnny Marr's genius work of the 80s and found a new home for it.

Suede have always been very London, very now, and very glam. When their live shows suddenly knocked their music press on their collective ears, they were instantly hailed as the most important British band since the Smiths, and their fey, leering frontman Brett Anderson as the most important star since Bowie. (Nobody, of course, does absurdist hype like the British music press.) Calling their debut album some strange amalgam of the two is easy (I'm what, the millionth to do it?) but it's also true. Preceded first by the hard-driving "The Drowners" in 1992 and then the bright, calling "Metal Mickey" ("ohhhh dad -- she's -- duh-riving me MAAAD"), Suede debuted at #1, full of really big songs about cars and glitter and drugs and having sweet F.A. to do today but getting away from council homes somehow. It was music calculated to grab the teens whose dads were grabbed by Ziggy Stardust twenty years before. It is, of course, perfect in every possible way.

Licensed to Columbia in the US, their Nude Records debut was only on shelves a short time before an American singer named Suede sued them for trademark infringement and the disc was pulled, forcing the band to do business in the States as The London Suede.

The following year, Suede made the jump from Ziggy-Bowie to Diamond Dogs-Bowie with the weird poetry and dark images of Dog Man Star, which was preceded by the anthemic hit "Stay Together." The odd album nearly derailed their career and proved there was more friction between Butler -- the band's apparent leader -- and Anderson. Butler lost, leaving many pundits wondering whether there was enough strength left in the remnants of Suede to continue.

Recruiting Richard Oakes to replace Butler and adding Neil Codling on keyboards, Anderson became the principal songwriter in time for the eye-opening Coming Up, which took a cue from Pulp's analysis of a disaffected British youth and ran like a big, wondrous overblown monster to the top of the charts. Coming Up is huggingly brilliant, one of the most audacious and perfect pop albums of the decade. It screams disposability and passion in the same breath, essaying the desperate yearnings of kids looking for love in council flats, but also sneeringly demanding a right to be lazy, to be trash, to be litter on the breeze and lovers on the streets. "Trash" is Anderson's "Heroes," an awesome anthem, played with absolute commitment and which must be played at maximum volume. The kids are very much all right. Head Music repeats the formula with very little growth, so it's inarguably the inferior volume, but let's not forget that this is a winning formula and this remains a thrilling, wonderful record. The hit "Electricity," with its simplistic verse and endlessly repeated ending, gets things off to a great start, and the blocks are laid down for a rollercoaster progression of fast songs with slow ones in the right places. "Everything Will Flow" and "Hi-Fi" are likewise perfect.

Promotion for Head Music continued into 2000, but the European tour was interrupted by Neil Codling's illness. The keyboardist formally left the band in 2001 during studio sessions for Suede's fifth album, due in 2002.

SUEDE: Sci-Fi Lullabies (1998, UK #9, ***)
Big bonus points for getting a compilation right. This is a double-CD containing 27 B-sides and bonus tracks from Suede's first four years in chronological order, with lyrics and sleeve reproductions. Despite the tendency for bands to leave castoffs and rejects on their B-sides (see REM), the music here isn't even a hair off their album quality. Unfortunately, the strict chronological presentation means that a huge chunk of the first CD (tracks 2-7) are slow-paced downers, making this an unsuitable "first listen" for newcomers. On the other hand, track 8 is "My Dark Star," which is one of the best songs ever written, and which my upstairs neighbors have grown to hate.