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First album was a slight disappointment in that a huge chunk of it had already been released on singles. Dog Man Star is, for me, the best thing the group have done. It stretched (and tore through) the boundaries of what everyone expected from them.
When they first appeared, the UK indie market was awash with half-arsed DIY gumph (Senseless Things, Ned's Atomic Dustbin, Kingmaker*) where the groups involved were impossible to tell apart from the people in the moshpit. Part of the Suede ethos was to breathe life back into the idea of pop/rock stars. Anderson thought that what had been missing for far too long was the sense of putting on a show, making yourselves stand out, being something special. Ned's fans could easily get drunk with the band (on cider, probably). Suede wanted the fans to scream when Anderson so much as looked at them.
The whole Anderson/Butler relationship was persumably supposed to add to this. It was frequently compared to the Morrissey/Marr partnership, sometimes Bowie/Ronson. Again, the 'star' thing.
Dog Man Star, as Lada says, was all about the melodrama. It completely redefined people's notions of what an 'indie' act could pull off. The two singles, Stay Together (released between albums one and two) and The Wild Ones were absolutely magnificent. Once Butler left the group, the records quickly became far more simple, mostly coming on like a parody of the earlier days.
Check out the B-sides compilation, Sci-Fi Lullabies for proof - the first eleven tracks could quite easily have been released on a proper album (one that would have been far better than the group's first), whereas the ones that follow are - with maybe one exception - completely lacklustre.
Every now and again on the last two albums they'd stumble into a fairly fantastic riff or chorus, but they never even managed to hint at what they'd once been.
Current evidence suggests that they never will, but I remain hopeful.
*I think. Kingmaker may have been one of the groups to follow in their wake, I can't remember exactly. |
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