Suede – Coming Up (1996)

Suede's self-titled debut album was one of the first proper Britpop albums ever to come out. Some might even say they started Britpop, although there are some other takers for that title. Suede's second album Dog Man Star was not as easily approachable and there were lots of long ballads that take a bit of time to get into. As a result, Suede was taken away from the limelight of Britpop while Oasis, Blur and Pulp were hogging all the attention. The lead guitarist of Suede, Bernard Butler, left the band after Dog Man Star and the vocalist Brett Anderson wanted to make Suede more popular again by making an album that would almost be an opposite of Dog Man Star, an easily approachable album full of straightforward hits. That's what Coming Up is really, an album with 10 hit songs that could easily all get on the radio.



I personally liked the more alternative sounds of Dog Man Star and therefore Coming Up was a way to a wrong direction in my opinion. Then again, there are some absolutely amazing hits on this album that I've danced to many times and played as a DJ for dancing crowds. I really do think there's genuine merit in making songs like that, even if, from the artistic point of view, I liked the previous two albums more.

As a teenager, Suede was the least meaningful of the big four Britpop bands Oasis, Blur, Pulp and Suede. I did listen to some of their music and even liked it, but I only bought the albums later on and only really started properly listening to their music later when I discovered the more melancholic songs on the self-titled debut and Dog Man Star.

I didn't see Suede live until about five years ago in London when they made their come back. The show was quite amazing though. They played a few songs from the new album in the very beginning, but the rest of the over two hour gig was just about the hits from the old albums. They were played with single cover art of those songs in the background. Even though it was a bit late, I really enjoyed seeing Suede live at least that one time.

The album starts with Trash, one of the all time biggest hits from the band. This is the song that I played in indie discos in university all the time and it was guaranteed to get many nostalgic feeling young adults to the dance floor. Filmstar has a great pulsing rhythm and heavy guitars that remind me of 70's T.Rex, which apparently was something of an inspiration for this album. Lazy continues the list of absolute Britpop hits. The echoey vocals sound a bit strange from today's perspective, but the melody is amazingly catchy and chorus is like made to be sung along by large crowds. By the Sea is the first song on the album that breaks the intensity a bit. This ballad would've benefited from Bernard Butler's innovative guitars. She is another modern glam rock jewel. The rhythm is very captivating and Anderson's vocals are seductively brilliant. This is followed by Beautiful Ones that is the other one of Suede's all time biggest hits from this album. Pretty much everyone approximately my age will know the lyrics to this chorus. Starcrazy has some similar guitar sounds to Suede's first couple of albums, but otherwise the sounds stay a bit hollow in comparison. The chorus, on the other hand, is a brilliant tune. Picnic by the Motorway is a slightly different sounding song to the rest of the album. I feel like this is closer to B-sides I've heard on the Sci-fi Lullabies compilation. The Chemistry Between Us has some dramatic string arrangements. It's not the most interesting composition, but the sounds help a lot. The album ends with a fantastic ballad Saturday Night, which became the frequent slow song in discos over Europe. I'm sure I've danced "slow dances" to this song quite a few times.

When I was in my early teens, we had MTV through a satellite at home, but I was devastated when the housing community decided that we didn't continue subscribing to MTV because it was too expensive and for the latter part of the 90's I didn't have MTV. I used to love MTV and I remember seeing Animal Nitrate video quite a few times in the early 90's. As a result, I'm not as familiar with the music videos of this era, but I still do remember Suede's video for Beautiful Ones. It's quite a simple black and white music video with the band playing in a studio, but there are flashes of colourful images of different items that have the words that are sung in the lyrics. It's a great example of what music videos were at the golden era of music videos.

Coming Up is definitely one of the most popular albums for my generation in Europe. In US, Suede wasn't really that well known and they even called it London  Suede as they already had a band called Suede. In Finland, Suede was one of the big four Britpop bands and generally people thought that the whole movement was only restricted to those four bands. I only learned later on that in the UK, it's not that clear that these are THE four Britpop bands. Anyway, Suede was once a huge deal and Coming Up is their most hit-filled album that isn't necessarily much of a concept album, but has some amazing individual songs on it.

Listen to the album on Spotify.