By resisting the bluster of past efforts, the Montreal band emerges with its most cohesive album yet, the first that never gets lost in its own dark gravity.
Suuns are almost maddeningly consistent. Over a decade-plus career firmly wedged between the “experimental” and “indie” sections of your local record shop, the band’s instantly identifiable brand of vampiric electro-rock has unraveled like a scroll, revealing new dimensions in an expanding universe of existential dread. Held together by singer Ben Shemie’s ghost-in-the-machine croon, the Montreal trio (formerly quartet) doesn’t so much innovate with each new release as restlessly explore the same familiar, walled-off territory.
Their last full-length, Felt, showed hairline cracks forming in that dam. Purging some of their obsession with grim avant-pop provocation, they brought a generousness of spirit that gave the album a warm sense of psychedelic intimacy. Even as they lashed out with abrasive, rushing energy on tracks like “Look No Further,” the tempered, even honeyed nostalgia of centerpiece ballad “Make It Real” suggested the cooling passions of a band making peace with uncertainty.
But growth is messy, and the grainy rumblings of 2020’s FICTION EP flashed like a warning sign that the band was ready, if not eager, to reopen the portal and relapse into the haze. So it’s a welcome surprise that on The Witness, Suuns are in full communion with a calmer approach to anxiety. Their latest is fundamentally chilled out, plunging the band into frigid landscapes that they softly crawl over with post-rock-like delicacy recalling fellow Canadians Badge Epoque Ensemble. Sprawling and beat heavy, the album’s drift is a perfect staging ground for Shemie’s sentimental explorations of the sicknesses inherent in embodied life. Like a spirit forced into corporeal form, Shemie painstakingly unpacks his alienation, and with the band tightly reined in around gentle electronic lullabies, he’s never sounded better. By resisting the bluster of past efforts, Suuns emerge with their most cohesive album yet, the first that never gets lost in its own dark gravity.
The instrumental palette of The Witness reflects the (relative) ease with which they’ve mellowed. On “Timebender,” synthesizers that once hissed and groaned now curl gently around your ear, trading fours with sampled birdcalls. Guitars that once rushed with nervous aggression quietly trickle into the mix; when the dreamy chords that close out “Witness Protection” finally arrive, they slowly drift into focus from far out in the stereo field, like sunlight tapping at a window. There’s a newfound fixation with lowering themselves into a groove rather than trying to tear themselves out of it. It’s hard to imagine a band like Suuns improvising like a jazz trio, but the way their ideas expand and contract over the six minute micro-odyssey “The Trilogy,” it sounds like an unrehearsed nocturnal jam session.
These changes reflect back onto Shemie, who paradoxically has never sounded more like a frontperson than he does here. His voice presides over everything, so much so that when he slips into the background to allow Erik Hove’s saxophone space to riff on the romantic meditations of album highlight “Clarity,” you feel the absence acutely, craving his inhuman warmth. Shemie’s lyrics usually telegraph his own disgust from a comfortable distance, but the band’s steady pacing has relaxed him into confessional confidence, an acknowledgment of how long he’s put up a steely facade. “I don’t want to wear this mask/To conceal/The way I feel,” he moans on “Third Stream,” before defeatedly admitting that he’s finally “seen too much” as the track spins off into the night. When his tender whine fades in on the penultimate track, “Go to My Head,” crying out for “no more tears,” it’s as if he’s speaking to you from across a shared pillow, peering into your eyes at the end of a long night of the soul. Embracing the sweetness pulls out a different side of Shemie, one you wonder if even he knew he had in him.
The swarm of cicadas that opens the record reappears to close out the album, trapping these tender emotions in a locked groove. As the album spins back upon itself, Suuns seem almost to revel in the consistency of mood and texture that they’ve achieved on this record. The Witness unlocks a parallel universe for the band, and though Suuns are still sculpting monoliths to paranoia, to hear them chipping away with such steady hands is a welcome treat.
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