Birds & Beasts is the fifth full length album from SUSS and they continue to hang out and bring new life to this abandoned mining town of music, documenting the wildlife that crosses through the vast expanses.
A majestic and hardscrabble rumination on the wilderness
Just what is ambient country? It’s the sound of a rusting vintage truck as it ambles on down the lost highways of America’s west into the sunset. It is the sound of SUSS. It is the soundtrack to ghost towns and wind blown tumbleweed blown across a dust strewn landscape as blue skies are painted gold and crimson red. Ambient country is a musical location where your eyes start playing tricks on you, make you think that cactus down the road is actually a man wearing a cowboy hat. It’s the sound of spurs swirling in the insect laden air, but played on a synthesizer accompanied by pedal steel, slide guitar and the plink of a broken down honky-piano that has drifted out of tune.
Birds & Beasts is the fifth full length album from SUSS and they continue to hang out and bring new life to this abandoned mining town of music, documenting the wildlife that crosses through the vast expanses. Some might call this a music of desolation, of isolation, but they show there is life in the gravel and sweetness in the smell of mesquite campfires where wordless songs are strummed underneath the glistening light of distant stars.
Their new album is a majestic and hardscrabble rumination on the wilderness, the beasts of prey, and the circling vultures, the hunting birds that spiral in wild gyres as the sun beats down and turns it all into a hallucinatory mirage. This is a music of the elements, of wood, water, stone and fire. This is music that finds the thread between the hi-tech, as conjured by the slow pulse of the synths as it redefines the rustic world across a smeared expressionist microtonal landscape.
Listen for the signs of life ::
Mandolin and violin are here too. So is the melancholy. What is absent are the typical country lyrics about what has been lost or taken, what has gone and disappeared, like a dog tearing after some varmint into the underbrush never to be seen again. The loss is still here, but what comes after it? Their lyrical void is pregnant with poignant as lines of possibility are sketched in a minor key.
Follow the tracks of the animals and listen for the signs of life. Follow the marks left in the dust as they ply the high tension wires of guitar strings where one horizon seamlessly bleeds into the next. Follow the traces of these murmuring fantasias. There will be time to rest and sleep like a hobo further down the blood spattered tracks. Experience the freedom of a traveler who has hopped another train into a desert of dreams, hunting for an even bigger dream. Meander along with SUSS into the wide open spaces of big country, endless skies.
Jonathan Gregg — Pedal steel
Bob Holmes — Acoustic Guitar, Mandolin, Violin, Keyboards, Harmonica & Loops
Pat Irwin — Guitars, Ebow, Bass, Keyboards, Piano, Loops & Additional Pedal Steel on “Beasts”
Gary Leib — Synths, Loops & Good Vibes on “Migration”
Birds & Beasts is available on Northern Spy. [Bandcamp]
