I seem to be on a '90s Britpop kick. After indulging my Pulp obsession yesterday, I decided to give A New Morning (Suede's much maligned last album before originally splitting) another shot.
I hadn't listened to it in ages but was shocked at how much I enjoyed it, or my edit of it anyway (see below). Suede are one of those bands (mainly later in their career) where a lot of their copious b-sides could be swapped out for some of the clunky, minor tracks on their later albums. There are always hidden gems among their many b-sides, so many in fact that they released a double album of b-sides only three albums into their career. Must have been all the uppers in Suede's sordid past that kept the workflow frantic.
Slammed as being "un-Suedelike" and "too gentle and soft," 2003's A New Morning has the band's most acoustic and pastoral material. After the cold, workmanlike sheen of 1999's Head Music (and battling a pretty serious drug addiction), lead singer Brett Anderson wanted to leave some of the dark Suede lexicon behind him. Can we fault him for that choice?
I love playing "rework the playlist" games with previously released albums. In the age of iTunes playlists and simple deletion, one can create the album the fans really wanted, a project unavailable in Suede's heyday, unless you're a fan of making a hodgepodge cassette tape of a CD. Thankfully it's not 1996 anymore.
The revisited A New Morning; deleting two middling album tracks, reshuffled tracklist, and three superior b-sides added:
1. Positivity
2. Obsessions
3. Lonely Girls
4. Lost in TV
5. One Hit to the Body
6. Morning
7. Astrogirl
8. When the Rain Falls
9. You Belong to Me
10. Instant Sunshine
11. Simon
12. Cheap
13. Oceans
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