“Before Your Birthday Ends”
from the album Wild Smile
2010
iTunes
It’s not often that a band emerges as fully formed and fantastic as Brooklyn quartet Suckers. Of course, they’ve been on the scene for a year or so now and front-man Quinn Walker had previously released a couple of under-appreciated solo albums, but even their debut release as a unit — last year’s eponymous four-song EP — could’ve been mistaken for the work of a band at their creative peak. With their costumed performances, Suckers were never going to be just another scratchy punk band, but that record must have come as a shock even to those already familiar with Walker’s earlier eccentric alchemy. Produced by Yeasayer’s Anand Wilder, those initial offerings combined the glam grandeur and arch poise of Davids Bowie and Byrne, with the angular leanings of New York’s current art-rock crowd and a grab-bag of world-music influences. The three-part group vocals earned obvious Animal Collective comparisons, but in reality the sound was all their own; an artistic mission statement that set bloggers’ fingers alight and put the band on the radar of major taste-makers, including MTV, who named Suckers their “breakout band of 2010.”
Thankfully, in an age where so many new bands blow their load with their first single, Suckers’ debut album Wild Smile conforms to tradition and delivers on the promise of the EP. Opener “Save Your Love for Me” is a radically reworked version of a track from Walker’s 2008 Lion Land album, and immediately makes explicit the Prince influence that subtly flavoured the EP and hovers over this album like a purple haze. Maybe it’s the slow-build and weeping guitars that saturate the massive finale, or perhaps it’s just the hysteric falsetto Walker adopts mid-way, but there is definitely more than a hint of “Purple Rain” on display, and it is to Suckers’ credit that they pull off such an ambitious homage so naturally. Next, they switch to indie-rock mode, with “Black Sheep” mining the same territory as latter-day Modest Mouse, all jagged riffs, fuzz-bass and thumping disco drums, before turning back towards His Purple Majesty for the stuttering funk and cascading guitars of “Before Your Birthday Ends,” a particular stand-out among an album full of highlights.
The middle section of the album slows things down, giving the tracks room to breathe and expand, and the band a chance to display their experimental chops. On “A Mind I Knew,” Brian Aiken’s machine-like drumming – as muscular and single-minded throughout the album as a musical Terminator robot – is bolstered by percussive loops and sampled video-game bleeps courtesy of keyboard/multi-instrumentalist Pan. “Martha” introduces mariachi trumpets, and the floaty “King Of Snakes” features what sounds like backwards accordion, but these extras serve as textural embellishments rather than showy focal points. In the hands of another band, they could easily be construed as desperate attempts to crowbar in some ethnic influences; here, they are essential components of a carefully constructed tapestry. “It Gets Your Body Movin’,” the bombastic chant-along that has become Suckers’ signature song — and, as such the lone EP track to make the album — still does what it says it does, although the moving in question is more of a drunken sway.
After another over-blown Prince-ly epic in the shape of “2 Eyes 2 C,” the album closes with “Loose Change,” which starts out like a lonesome Nilsson ballad, before snapping into a sloppy, stop-start groove. As they do across the course of the record, Pan and guitarist Austin Fisher join in on throaty chorus harmonies, and whilst the voices are rowdier and distinctly less pitch-perfect than current touch-stones like Dirty Projectors and Animal Collective, the feeling is just as joyous. In fact, in a world of easily digestible press release soundbytes, it wouldn’t be doing these guys any injustice to place them at the point where those bands overlap: experimental and accessible, primal and futuristic. But whilst Bitte Orca and Merriweather Post Pavillion both felt like the culminations of their creators’ respective journeys, Wild Smile is just the beginning for Suckers, and that in itself is a truly mouth-watering prospect.