The interplay between wide, somber space and the staccato optimism of enduring life makes for the most thoughtfully structured record of SUSS’s career. Birds & Beasts doesn’t necessarily surprise, but it crystallizes this band’s essence, particularly as they find their footing after the shocking loss of Leib. These seven tracks are full of delicate balances, so immaculately produced that supple details assume their own life—the way that the guitar melody barely floats on the surface of “Restless,” for example, or how Gregg’s pedal steel seems to shift its direction in the middle of the song, as though the band just reversed the current of a river.
The only cut to feature their late bandmate is “Migration,” which has kicked around in the SUSS songbook for years before ending up as this album’s closer. The most maximal composition in an understated set, “Migration”—like “Restless” and “Flight”—is sewn by thin stitches of guitar, diaphanous parts that keep this patchwork whole. Meanwhile, Holmes’ harmonica offers a sense of yearning, a train whistle heard in a one-horse town.
Such connotations bring with them all of the postmodern weight and irony accrued since America developed a vocabulary for describing the culture (one-horse!) of its sprawling heartland. Ditto the song’s buried vocal loops, most of them inaudible, although we can hear a male voice say, “Finally, they believed that they had the answers,” a self-serious exclamation that fizzles out like a distant radio signal. We begin the album with an image of the migratory patterns of the titular birds and beasts, and end thinking about humanity as it zooms forth so quickly that the world-expanding achievements of yesteryear become quaint, bits of modern archaeology familiar enough that they have become part of our species’ natural habitat.
SUSS revel in slippery distinctions between the manmade and the organic, the way that a synthesizer can sound indistinguishable from an acoustic instrument in the right hands. Their latest, though, puts human achievement in context—our entire civilization, this searching, glacial music seems to tell us, is merely a blip at the tail end of a slow evolution. Or, in other words: Birds & Beasts offers the revelation of a cross-country road trip, when the towns fall away and the land becomes grander, when people begin to feel as small as they actually are.
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