Suuns - Zeroes QC
- Written by Russell Warfield
Debut albums often fall prey to being little more than shit thrown at a wall; a blank canvas on which a band throw around ideas with no consideration to an overarching sound or sense of cohesion. The debut album from Suuns – Zeroes QC – sounds like it should be one of these albums when described on paper. Mixing a blend of electronic noise, post rock guitars, brooding minimalism and droning shoegaze, it sounds almost impossible to convincingly chart a trail from A to B by way of these touchstones. Remarkably, however, Suuns act with precision, confidence and nerve – carving a fiercely well developed aural identity over the course of these debut tracks, in spite of their broadly diverse building blocks.
One of the band’s go-to methods for maintaining a central unity to their music (at least on a song by song basis) is to have at least one constant running throughout each track, providing a foundation upon which to build jams that can twist, turn and mutate whilst always being able to return to base. This need not be much: it could just be languidly looping sequencers, or – in the case of seven minute centrepiece ‘Sweet Nothing’ – merely rapid bursts of a single note, but once the rhythm section have found something to tightly latch themselves to, these tracks swing from thick and hazy guitar squalor, to stripped back minimalist electronics without jarring.
Suuns are clearly a band who likes to find a groove and ride it, and so a lot of these songs open with – or at least include – lengthy instrumental passages, layering upwards and upwards into ever thickening textures. The brilliant ‘Arena’ opens with loops of electronic arpeggios, before layering layers and layers of chugging guitars. But just as you fear that these jams are running out of steam, or are heading for a head-on collision with a glass ceiling, the band avert stagnancy by reintroducing one of the other essential lynchpins granting these tracks their relatively rigid sense of coherence: the ethereal falsetto of lead vocalist Ben Shemie. Swooping in out of nowhere once the guitars have towered as high as they can, or the eerie minimalist groove can skulk no further, Shemie drops the sort of effortlessly melodic hooks that save Suuns from being slapped with the lazy labels (or, indeed, dismissals) of drone or ambience. The aforementioned ‘Arena’ has a particularly addictive earwig of a chorus refrain; sassily snarling over an ascending bass line, the thing comes damn close to being a hip-shaker.
With the two final tracks of the record, however, we’re left with two examples of straight up song writing. Largely stripped of their beats and electronics, we see Suuns effortlessly – and seamlessly – try their hand at purely vocal-led work; again, to brilliant and eerie effect. It’s a gamble to establish a particular sound during the first three quarters of your debut only to meddle with it with the last couple of tracks, but it’s a gamble which pays off owing to the fact that Suuns – in spite of these ostensible stylistic shifts – always retain a distinct aural identity over the course of the record’s entirety. Naturally, being a debut, this record does retain the band’s fingerprints of experimentation, feet finding, and even missing the mark slightly every now and then but – especially considering the amount of competition from more well established acts making music of this nature right now – this is a strikingly commanding debut from a band with an excitingly audacious awareness of exactly what they want to achieve with their sound.