Review Summary: Flensburg und das BKA, Haben unsere Daten da.
On Suuns' latest endeavor,
Felt, the band have captured themselves at a moment in time where their sound is undergoing yet another transformation. It's not as transitional a sound as 2013's
Images du Futur; nor is it as ominous as 2016's
Hold/Still, but instead,
Felt finds our boys from Montreal getting a hold of an armory of gadgets and refusing to go without them for a single minute. At first glance, the newfound aggression on cuts such as "Watch You, Watch Me" and "Daydream" is encouraging; but when taking another glance and recognizing a very obvious pattern in the songs' structure, the chink in Suuns' armor is as plain as day. While once taking cues from Suicide and Can (among many other groups), Kraftwerk is the band's (potentially) unnoted guiding light for their latest album cycle; in drawing from the nuts and bolts of Kraftwerk's cold itinerary, whether it's the vocoded vocals or the further emphasis on motorik rhythms, Suuns have come frighteningly close to losing the edge that made albums such as
Images du Futur and
Hold/Still some of the most interesting rock records of the decade.
Felt, in turn, is not Suuns going through the motions; it's Suuns putting down their guitars and dusting off the synthesizers and scrounging up less than stellar material. Suuns' records, while notably rife with challenging music, always retained a sense of humanity within their steel confines and you always got the sense the possibilities with their records were endless.
Felt makes no discernible attempt at progressing the sound of its predecessors, which is the worst part of the loathsome slog all must endure when listening to this record. Never before has the band sounded so comfortable or as calculated, which props itself up to be the very downfall of
Felt.
