Review Summary: Deconstruction/Reconstruction: A disillusionment for the ages
It's tempting to try and compare
Hold/Still to my current state of mind, or ideally, my entire generation's state of mind. Here I am, existing in a year that ten years ago, I had no idea how to imagine. It can be puzzling, trying to find what makes one moment different from the next. But at the same time, the answer is all around us. Modern appeared, then postmodern logically followed. What comes after postmodern? Does it matter? Because in spite of all the confusion, here Suuns are, casually presenting us a work that immediately sounds disillusioned and disaffected, yet at the same time propelled by a meticulous urgency. It could be classified as "post-punk," sure, but frankly, here the "punk" takes a back seat to the hyper-precise texturing, to the unsettling newness of it all. I want to compare the album to myself because, oh,
I'm so disillusioned, but by the end of the album, I'm reminded: what the hell do I have to be disillusioned about? Surely no more than any other twentysomething from any other era. And that's the moment when
Hold/Still transcends: when it reveals itself as so much more than the "disillusioned" era that incidentally spawned it.
Once these distinctions are made, it's easier to see that this album is something truly challenging. It's a new space, a new foundation. Things are sparse until they're oh so very not. Crunchy powerchord patterns are never relied on; the guitars' effects for the most part are thin and clicky, usually playing single-note melodies that dance atop the far more present, and devilishly resonant synths. And the drums are rarely integral to the climaxes; they consistently provide an ironically underplayed backbone. The album never feels like it's putting on a show, as the songs are built more on a piece-by-piece basis, rather than being pre-constructed explosions decidedly demanding your attention. You may be deceived by opener "Fall," as its swells of jagged guitar noise mixed with pound after pound of electronic drums do appear a little less than nuanced. But this appearance is quickly shaken by the following "Instrument," a song with so much space between its every element that you're convinced there's nothing in it you're not hearing. That the album achieves so much unlikely harmony from its seeming contradictory pieces gives it a power that lasts its entire length, no matter what era you're listening to it in.
To dedicate an entire paragraph to the vocals on
Hold/Still would be kind of missing the point, I think. But they are what the aesthetic naturally advances toward, and they're also where the
disillusionment really comes into play. Vocalist Ben Shemie's performance doesn't sound like it was sweat-inducing. His subtle shifts in pitch are just enough to call it singing. But the devious way he enunciates "
resist" against a looping guitar echo in "Resistance" is harrowing. And he passes "harrowing," into the realm of downright creepy on "Careful," helped by the fact there's two of him overlapping, suggesting one in the past and one in the present, and that now he just "
needs to be more careful." And things are only intensified by how eerily well his paranoid, slightly deranged tones work against the song's wall of pulsating synths and stuttering cymbals. But even while he's always a present element, his vocals never distract from anything else. He works alongside the band, rather than on top of them. You could call this a sign of disillusionment, I suppose, as a disproportionately emphasized singer has been in the way of "traditional" for decades. But then again, you could also just chalk it up to tasteful musicianship.
And despite its somewhat unforgiving strangeness,
Hold/Still does remain tasteful, in that it gives you more than enough room to appreciate its subtleties. The bright, fuzzy synth notes that float in like the flicker of a candle in the refrain of "Mortise and Tenon" are all the song really needs for a chorus. The clean, wispy guitar strums at the beginning of "Brainwash" remind one of a softer Deerhunter track, before they give way to a brazen, industrial-ish drumbeat. The album makes massive statements with the tiniest pops and cracks, and in this context, that becomes infinitely more ear-catching than any crashing, psychedelic wall of sound. At first making hardly any noise, "Paralyzer" is still recognizable as a brilliant piece of bitter satire: its punchless kick drum and stale, comical handclaps supported by the chorus of
"ooooh, everything." At times the album is an intimidating landscape to travel; you wouldn't be lambasted for finding "Translate's" spiraling guitar motif a tad annoying, and sometimes the sheer lack of posturing seems like... well, a little like posturing. But even if you can't latch on to any of the careful, disaffected beauty in the songs preceding it, penultimate track "Nobody Can Save Me Now" cuts through it all for a moment, and offers probably the most poignant set of words on the album:
"My son, my son, forget everything I said
Don't go readin' between the lines, was just fuckin' with your head
Don't you know, don't you know nothin' comes free?
But I felt you, and I knew that you loved me"
Disillusionment. And the chorus, "
oooooh, nobody can save me now," makes that lament of hopelessness sound more like a sigh of relief. A sigh of freedom. There's a solo too, left to scuttle under a layer of thin, awkward distortion. But because of how gracefully the song was set up for it, this touch of texture is immediately seen as ingenious, rather than needless.
A work so sharply perceptive of its own landscape, and such a strange one at that, can't possibly be disillusioned. Or maybe it is. Maybe
Hold/Still really is lost among these trying times. That would explain its wide, unpredictable variety of sounds. But what one cannot say is that the album is lost within itself. It's too balanced, too well-paced, and frankly, too
good for that to be true. And I'm definitely done with the idea now that this album, or any other like it, is here for any one generation. Built with what it had, which was all it had, I'm confident
Hold/Still will be here forever.
