The interaction between large, somber house and the staccato optimism of tolerating life makes for essentially the most thoughtfully structured document of SUSS’s profession. Birds & Beasts doesn’t essentially shock, nevertheless it crystallizes this band’s essence, notably as they discover their footing after the surprising lack of Leib. These seven tracks are filled with delicate balances, so immaculately produced that supple particulars assume their very own life—the way in which that the guitar melody barely floats on the floor of “Stressed,” for instance, or how Gregg’s pedal metal appears to shift its path in the midst of the track, as if the band simply reversed the present of a river.
The one reduce to characteristic their late bandmate is “Migration,” which has kicked round within the SUSS songbook for years earlier than ending up as this album’s nearer. Essentially the most maximal composition in an understated set, “Migration”—like “Stressed” and “Flight”—is sewn by skinny stitches of guitar, diaphanous elements that hold this patchwork complete. In the meantime, Holmes’ harmonica affords a way of craving, a prepare whistle heard in a one-horse city.
Such connotations deliver with them the entire postmodern weight and irony accrued since America developed a vocabulary for describing the tradition (one-horse!) of its sprawling heartland. Ditto the track’s buried vocal loops, most of them inaudible, though we will hear a male voice say, “Lastly, they believed that they’d the solutions,” a self-serious exclamation that fizzles out like a distant radio sign. We start the album with a picture of the migratory patterns of the titular birds and beasts, and finish fascinated by humanity because it zooms forth so shortly that the world-expanding achievements of yesteryear turn into quaint, bits of contemporary archaeology acquainted sufficient that they’ve turn into a part of our species’ pure habitat.
SUSS experience slippery distinctions between the artifical and the natural, the way in which {that a} synthesizer can sound indistinguishable from an acoustic instrument in the correct fingers. Their newest, although, places human achievement in context—our complete civilization, this looking, glacial music appears to inform us, is merely a blip on the tail finish of a sluggish evolution. Or, in different phrases: Birds & Beasts affords the revelation of a cross-country street journey, when the cities fall away and the land turns into grander, when folks start to really feel as small as they really are.
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