Direct drama

The Suede get swayed by soul

by Amy Finch

On their first two full-length discs, the London Suede played pop symphonies that sparkled with glitter and swoon, and the bliss of feeling dreadfully sorry for yourself. No doubt the boys and girls who once worshipped the Smiths found a new home for their ardor in the glam-and-mope artistry of Suede ('93) and the theatrical elegance of Dog Man Star ('94). Both recordings forged a matchless mix of style and soul.

Suede's genius was fed by fetching androgyne Brett Anderson, who wrote and sang in a rapturous sob, and co-writer Bernard Butler, who constructed guitar backdrops steeped in drama. Drama that might've felt like insufferable farce if not for its self-awareness and rich beauty. "Have I gone too far inside my mind?", Anderson wondered at one point. Not too far to forget the allure of melancholy set to sound.

Right after Dog Man Star, Butler left the band, and fans worried that it meant the finish, same as when Morrissey and Johnny Marr stopped talking. Now that there's finally a Butler-less Suede disc, Coming Up (all are on nude/Columbia), one's first impulse is to zoom in on the imprint of his replacement, Richard Oakes, who was only 17 when he got hired two years ago. Sure enough, Coming Up does unveil a different Suede. ("London" was tacked on a few years ago in the US for legal reasons -- an American singer named Suede.) Coming Up turns away from lushly drawn self-obsessions in favor of a pared-down approach. And Suede come across as bent less on shaping intricate tableaux than on getting glitzed up for adventure.

Coming Up is full of exuberant decadence and pride, from the single "Trash" ("We're the litter on the breeze") to "Saturday Night" ("We'll go to peepshows and freak shows/We'll go to discos, casinos/We'll go where people go and let go"). Where did all that life-loving sparkle come from?

"Partly it came from Richard," explains bassist Mat Osman over the phone during a break from a tour that brings the band to Boston this weekend. Oakes, Osman says, was writing "really compact pop songs. It was the first record he'd ever made, and I think your debut record tends to be quite vibrant and quite exciting. It's a natural thing. You just want to stamp your mark on the record. And partly we were just happier. Dog Man Star was made in such an oppressive situation. We were fighting and it was done in bits, and you can't help but for that to come out on the record. This one, as a band, we were just a lot happier. It was actually fun to make.

"With this album the stuff I like the best is stuff like `Saturday Night,' which is really plain. I think one of the things we tried to do was be less impressive. Brett had always written these lyrics that were quite impressive and they were quite," Osman pauses, "artistic. They sounded like they could almost be poems. This one we tried deliberately to make it a lot more heartfelt and a lot more simple."

Coming Up is the first Suede album done without a handful of outside-musician help. Besides Oakes, keyboardist Neil Codling joined the band. The new structure allowed for new freedom, says Osman. "It probably gives you a chance to shut up a bit because you don't have to fill in so many gaps. We're probably tighter than we've ever been, but that's also because we spent a year touring and a year practicing before we made the record."

"We used to be very rigid. In the past the songs would be written on guitar. Brett would put a tune to them, and then the band would flesh them out. But Richard's pretty open about the way he works. Some would just be Brett coming in with a phrase or a rhythm and we write around that, or just stuff the band does all together when we rehearse. We're trying to be quite open in the way we write."

For all its virtues Coming Up often lacks the earlier Suede's haunted fragility. The band's penchant for building an album around a thematic core is still in evidence, but the most glorious song on the disc is the understated "By the Sea." No glamor or primping here -- just a man and woman living along the shore, in a seaside shack, waiting to see what happens. The songcraft of other numbers may be more technically adroit, but "By the Sea" lingers like an unfinished love story. This time, the soul outweighs the style.

The London Suede play the Paradise this Saturday and Sunday, May 17 and 18, with Longpigs opening. Call 562-8800 or 423-6000.