Suede, Bloodsports (Suede Ltd.)Word had it that Suede had reformed and had produced an album to compare with their best as if that had come as some surprise. I don't know why it would. Brett hadn't been idle in the meantime and The Tears, with Bernard Butler back on good, or at least workable, terms had been an excellent project.
Brett had done his solo albums, of which the received opinion was that they were morose, maudlin and below par, but that was surely only to add the requisite period of drug dependancy to his rock star CV and credentials.
But, yes, this uses the same template as Head Music, perhaps more so than the more angular Dog Man Star but it is a good thing rather than a criticism to say it is very much more of the same. A celebration of tawdry glamour with busy embellishments from Richard Oakes's guitar.
It would be reasonable to suggest that by track 8 the album has revealed its adherence to the track ordering system that comes with CDs rather than LPs in which you stack up your best ammunition from the top and hope that some residual long finish from the early tracks carries over to make the later ones seem better but it did last until track 8 before I noticed that. The last tracks are the slower ones. It wasn't that Suede couldn't do slow ones before but these do sound a bit self-indulgent and perhaps he's lost the feeling of Saturday Night by now. After that, I simply don't know if the four bonus i-tunes tracks form part of the work under consideration or not. Where does it all end.
So, of course, Barriers stands alongside the best of their output. At least the first half of the album is as if they had never been away. A classic English band and a proper songwriter, it would have been a shame if they hadn't come back and done it all at least one more time.