Rating:
Very Good

Coming Up
The London Suede
Nude/Columbia

By Johnny Walker (Black)

What could they have been thinking of? Replacing the axe-hero for the '90s, Bernard Butler, who left the band in a macho hissy fit over the length of his guitar solos, with a mere 17-year-old kid? Surely the singer, that cheeky Brett Anderson, the man who literally ruled the first half of '90s British rock like a dandified sovereign--and whose band, some might say, paved the way for Britpop in the decade's second half--was in the midst of some smack-induced trance when he made that decision (hey, if Damon Albarn said it, it must be true, right?). When it was first released in the Commonwealth last year, it thus seemed that Coming Up was destined to be Suede's (I refuse to use the ridiculous "The London" US preface to their moniker--there's only one Suede, and talent, not inane legalities, should be the final deciding factor here) final bow, an ignominious footnote of failure to their once-promising career.

Well, as a famous American TV personality once uttered, "Surprise, surprise!" Not long after the album's initial release, the ever so fickle British rock press who had prophesied Anderson's demise were lining up to kiss his butt once again, and with good reason. As its phallic title implies, this is an album all about renewal and potency, the return of a wicked erection after a bout of enfeebling illness. Falsely labeled by some as a "comeback," Coming Up is rather a return, following the layered art-rock of their sophomore effort Dog Man Star (a monument to the brilliance of the doomed Butler/Anderson song writing team), to the more basic glam-rock roots of their eponymous debut. After seeming a bit of a hair-swinging Butler wannabe on tours to support an album he didn't appear on, newbie guitar slinger Richard Oakes makes his recording debut here in fine style, supporting head potentate Anderson's singular reworking of his main influences--David Bowie, Marc Bolan (T. Rex) and Scott Walker--with plenty of high voltage riffing a la Bowie's former "Spiders From Mars" cohort, the late and lamented Mick Ronson.

The lead-off track, "Trash," an anthemic glam-rocker, is a fine statement of purpose by which to define Suede II, as it were, an uncomplicated sing-a-long tune in which Anderson returns to his long-favoured thematic motif: the finding of glamour in the gutter, the extraordinary within the ordinary, the jewel in the pile of shit. "We're tra-a-a-sh you and me / We're the litter on the breeze . . . it's in everything we do," Anderson sings coyly over a hooky guitar line from Oakes, aided and abetted by atmospheric keyboard flourishes from the newest Suede recruit, the vampiricly stylish Neil Codling. "Filmstar," the next track, is even more striking, as Anderson narrates a tale of vacuous '90s super celebrity backed by a Ronson-esque, neo-metallic guitar riff heavier and more overtly macho than anything Suede has heretofore attempted. This is the sound of the band symbolically putting the boots to their doubters and detractors and having a great time while doing it.

Anderson's trademark romantic balladry is also in peak form throughout Coming Up. "By The Sea" depicts the struggles of two lovers who decide, against all odds, to reject the living death of work-a-day life, while "Picnic By the Motorway" which musically evokes Bowie's "Space Oddity," finds Anderson cleverly switching that song's theme of physical, otherworldly escape for one of innerwordly psychic oblivion: "Don't you worry," the narrator reassures his despondent lover, "I'll buy us a bottle and we'll drink in the petrol fumes." Cheeky middle-class types such as Blur's Damon Albarn (a.k.a. "Mr. Elastica") would no doubt have to revert to cynicism and irony in order to relate such scenarios, but Anderson, who comes from the working class world he describes, eschews any such distancing devices, identifying totally with the characters he creates.

What makes Suede a great band (and Coming Up a great album) is Anderson's ability to transmute everyday life into something special, to invert its values and substitute an aesthetic vision all his own, drawing the listener in and making him or her--perhaps unwittingly--share in his truly alternative vision. "Lazy," another great glam-rocker, could serve as the anthem for Anderson's world of poetic misfits and starry-eyed losers, being an anthemic rejection of a life wherein work has become the primary defining source of meaning and personal identity. Here, the narrator and his lover lay in bed watching the rat-race go by, its empty hustle and bustle "reminding us there's work to be done. But you and me," he drawls laconically, "all we want to be is lazy."

In Suede's world, it's the "drag acts" and the "drug acts," the "shaved heads" and the "rave heads" who Anderson extols on the album's centerpiece, "Beautiful Ones, who count most: by remaining useless, and thus outside the utilitarian system which envelops us at the end of the millennium, they retain control over themselves, are able to fashion themselves according to rules of their own imaginative making, rather than merely taking up membership in the lockstep horde of corporate clones. They are, therefore, special, entrusted with the task of keeping the creative human spirit alive under the most stultifying and deadening of external conditions.

Coming Up is an exaltation of and tribute to these, the world's unrepentant gutter-dandies, and also a rocking riposte to those who ever doubted that Suede, by any name, are one of the finest rock bands of the 1990s.

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