5. Head Music
'I feel real now walking like a woman/And talking like a stone age man' Drugs are an integral part of Suede's mystique, and the band's fourth album, Head Music, is probably the closest any band will get to sonically describing the effect of crack cocaine on the human nervous system. It offers an intense, incandescent high that lasts forever and then ends. After that, there's a low that never seems to end. And you can never get back to that first hit. That first hit is album opener 'Electricity', a hyper-saturated triumph of production, slabs and slabs of synth and fuzzed out guitar and Bolan-esque vocals adorning a song that would be too slight to exist in any other way. The band then apply this relentless sonic layering to every other track, most of which are not futuristic glam stompers but ballads that trudge ever onwards to the six minute mark. Self-indulgence is the other, more regrettable, side effect of all these drugz (apart from the health stuff, obvs). For anyone bothered enough to listen through these, it becomes apparent that Head Music is where Anderson's creative muse simply stops. On earlier records, he could sum up the entire brilliance and terror of youth in a single line- 'We'll scare the skies with tiger's eyes, oh yeah? Oh yeah'. Legitimately, and I mean this without a trace of hyperbole, he was the Byron of suburban longing, taking the listener on an acid-fuelled flight of fantasy even when they'd never had as much as a rolled-up cigarette. Here, he rhymes 'house' with 'mouse'. On another song, he sings 'All the people say you're down'. The song is called 'Down' and is about feeling down. It's as good as you would expect when it's been scrawled on the back of some tinfoil in between hits, and is the most audible evidence of the band's malaise, although not the most irritating. No, what irritates most is the band's crack-psychotic contempt for the listener. There are highlights, like 'Everything Will Flow', which was breezy enough to feature in adverts, but which (in a typically mean-spirited gesture) is also about shooting up. More characteristic is the proto-Fratellis (words no-one wants to read) clomp of 'Elephant Man', which is long and loud and very dull. Most sadistic of all, they place the only genuinely decent song at the end of the album. 'Crack in the Union Jack' is two minutes long and, with a simple acoustic backing, it renders the experience of addiction as a warped nursery rhyme. You might have to wade through twelve tracks of production gloop to get to it, but it does at least give the whole infuriating exercise a sense of meaning. For what it is- a moment of clarity after the rock has fizzed away- it's almost worth it.